Boston rights management startup picks up endorsements from Ashton Kutcher, Jack Dorsey

A Boston startup trying to transform the way media companies manage their rights and content management has picked up investments from Ashton Kutcher and Jack Dorsey as part of a seed funding round announced Thursday. 

Molten, founded by MIT MBA and ex-musician Arjun Mendhi, raised $7 million led by Abstract Ventures. In addition to Kutcher and Dorsey, former Walt Disney Co. president and Creative Artists Agency LLC (CAA) founder Michael Ovitz participated. 

The company’s cloud platform aims to help media companies with rights, content and financials in one place. Molten has customers from six continents who 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 platform, according to the company. 

There’s an entire framework that has to be built around the shift from television and film to streaming content, said Mendhi in an interview.

“There aren't sufficiently sophisticated technologies to do that today, and the technologies that do exist seem to fragment the operations quite a bit,” he said. “So Molten emerged on the scene with the idea that this is large enough of a space that it merits the development of a vertical cloud technology,” like in other industries such as manufacturing and restaurants, where companies have put full technology stacks together.

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“In the media space, we haven't seen that, and that's the pioneering approach from Molten," Mendhi said. "We are pioneering the idea of vertical technology for media operations.” 

Companies use Molten for three specific tasks: rights management, content management and financial management, like calculations about who gets paid from which distribution. Some of those customers are production companies, like Echelon Studios, and others are distributors, like Indie Rights. 

Mendhi has been working on these ideas for a decade, having formed the concept out of his experience as a professional musician. 

“I started asking questions like, who owns the rights to this content? Who stores the masters and how are these distributed around the world? Who gets to decide what the commercial terms would be, and so on.. And it got me really fascinated by the world of these underlying mechanics of the value chain in the media industry.” 

The startup is going to use its new funds to continue researching and improving its platform, as well as ramping up to onboard more customers, while growing to about 20 employees from 11. 

“Molten is an essential innovation needed to equip media and entertainment companies to scale effectively in the global streaming era,” said Ovitz in a statement.