CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Molten, a start-up that offers a comprehensive cloud platform to simplify rights, content and financial management for media and entertainment businesses, has raised $7 million in total seed funding, with investments from top Hollywood and tech luminaries as well as venture firms.
The funds will be used to help the company further develop its solution and operations.
The start-up noted that as video content consumption is rapidly growing streaming platforms, territories, and licenses globally, media companies need new technologies to help them address the challenge of efficiently licensing, distributing, and accounting for more content and revenue streams than ever before.
To address that problem, Molten has built an enterprise cloud platform that is designed to reimagine and simplify the management of conventional rights, content, and financial operations, the company said.
Since first launching the beta version of the platform in late 2019, customers from six continents have started using the solution. Currently, hundreds of millions of film and TV rights and hundreds of terabytes of content for catalogs worth hundreds of millions of dollars are managed on the Molten platform.
The company was founded in 2018.
The seed round of funding was led by Abstract Ventures; with participation from Ashton Kutcher, actor and partner at Sound Ventures; and Michael Ovitz, co-founder at CAA and former president at The Walt Disney Company.
Other participating individuals include Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO at Twitter and Square; Bill Ackman, CEO at Pershing Square Capital Management; Kevin Yorn, leading entertainment attorney; Steffen Naumann, former CFO at Axel Springer; Todd Ruppert, former president and CEO of T. Rowe Price Global Investments, and Henry Ward, CEO at Carta. Other participating venture capital funds include Lakestar and Valor Capital Group.
“While the media and entertainment industry is going through incredible growth, the increasing complexity of the various data streams demands modernization of back-office operations. Molten’s cloud technology is the platform we need now to connect people, data and processes within media organizations,” said Ramtin Naimi, partner at Abstract Ventures. “We are excited to invest in this business and support its mission to simplify processes and lower operating costs for the media industry.”
Michael Ovitz, co-founder at CAA, and former president at The Walt Disney Company added that “Molten is an essential innovation needed to equip media and entertainment companies to scale effectively in the global streaming era.”
