Cloud-based content rights and media tech company Molten said it has raised $7 million in seed funding from a group of investors including actor and tech entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher and former superagent, Creative Artists Agency co-founder and The Walt Disney Co. president Michael Ovitz, to help it further develop its operations.

The funding round, which Molten CEO Arjun Mendhi said was “significantly oversubscribed,” was led by Abstract Ventures, which includes among its investors Kutcher and Ovitz. They join Twitter founder Jack Dorsey; Pershing Square Capital Management CEO Bill Ackman; entertainment attorney Kevin Yorn; former Axel Springer CFO Steffen Naumann; former T. Rowe Price Global Investments CEO Todd Ruppert; and Carta CEO Henry Ward. Other participating venture capital funds include Lakestar and Valor Capital Group. 

Dorsey has been a long-time investor in Molten, and has provided insight and support to the company throughout its three-year history. Mendhi said that he hopes the other participating investors will share their expertise with Molten as it expands its product line and enters new markets. 

“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 Abstract Ventures partner Ramtin Naimi in a statement. “We are excited to invest in this business and support its mission to simplify processes and lower operating costs for the media industry.” 

In an interview, Mendhi said one of Molten’s top priorities will be to invest further in research and development.  

“We have a technology advantage at this point; we are going to invest in that and further strengthen that technology advantage,” Mendhi said in an interview, adding that the company also will focus on scaling operations. Molten has about 12 employees currently and should expand to “at least 20” by this time next year.  

Mendhi founded Molten in 2018 and the company launched the beta version of its software a year later. Since then, Molten has attracted customers from six continents that manage hundreds of millions of film and TV rights and hundreds of terabytes of content on the Molten platform. 

Former Viacom executive VP of global content distribution Denise Denson has been named chief operating officer at cloud-based content rights and media tech company Molten, the company said Tuesday.

Molten was formed in 2018 by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its platform allows media companies to simplify rights, content, and distribution management. Advisors to the company include Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey.

In her new role Denson will be responsible for Molten’s business development and operations functions including its expansion of capabilities into digitizing rights, content, distribution and financial operations. She reports directly to Molten founder and CEO, Arjun Mendhi.

“As demand for media and entertainment content continues to grow, Molten is evolving the underlying operations to bring scalable, automated and cost-effective cloud solutions to media and entertainment organizations,” Mendhi said in a press release. “We are thrilled to incorporate Denise’s extensive experience driving digital transformation across media distribution channels and platforms.”

Denson left Viacom (now ViacomCBS) in 2016 after 22 years at the company, where she developed and implemented a worldwide distribution strategy and led traditional and digital content distribution for more than two dozen channels, growing distribution revenues over a 10-year period from $1 billion to $5 billion annually.

“For the past 20 years, while other industries digitally transformed around us, entertainment content management kept its roots firmly planted in legacy systems built for another time,” Denson said in a press release. “Now, as consumers’ need for content grows, being able to manage and distribute content quickly is critical.”