Video content consumption is increasing rapidly across streaming platforms, territories, and licenses globally. Therefore, media companies face the challenge of efficiently licensing, distributing, and accounting for more content and revenue streams than ever before. Built for the pre-streaming era, existing tools to manage internal processes tend to fragment operations, limiting the scalability of media businesses and subjecting them to higher costs and legal risk.
MOLTEN is an enterprise cloud platform built from the ground up to address this problem. The solution reimagines conventional rights, content, and financial operations. Its unique vertical-cloud technology connects disparate data pipelines to provide a connected infrastructure for seamless process automation across the organization. Easy-to-use and highly customized cloud apps powered by this data layer help various teams across the organization interact with their data and automation without any coding required.
Today MOLTEN is announcing that it has raised $7 million in total seed funding, with investments from top Hollywood and tech luminaries and venture firms to help the company further develop its solution and operations.
Abstract Ventures led the seed round; 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, 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."
The global media and entertainment industry is taking note of MOLTEN's cloud-based platform. Since first launching the beta version of the platform in late 2019, customers from six continents have already onboarded, and today they manage hundreds of millions of film and TV rights and hundreds of terabytes of content for catalogs worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the MOLTEN platform.
Said Michael Ovitz, co-founder at CAA, and former President at The Walt Disney Company as well as a major Silicon Valley investor, "MOLTEN is an essential innovation needed to equip media and entertainment companies to scale effectively in the global streaming era."
Arjun Mendhi, CEO and founder at MOLTEN, came to the industry as an experienced computer engineer and product leader, who also has the experience of having been an artist and musician exposed to the challenges of managing entertainment rights.
"We exist to empower media rights-holders, such as production, distribution, and streaming organizations. They use the MOLTEN platform to transform their businesses," said Mendhi. "Some can, for the first time, connect rights, content, and financial data to avail new revenue opportunities. While others can automate various internal tasks, and go from months of work to seconds of processing and reduce costs significantly."
"We value the opportunity to help our customers thrive in the rapidly changing media industry," Mendhi continued. "We are thrilled to have the confidence and support of our investors and customers as we roll out the MOLTEN platform more widely for film and TV companies everywhere."
