Golden Ventures, a Canada-based venture capital firm, closed on over $100 million in capital commitments for its fifth fund targeting high-potential, seed-stage founders working across technologies, including AI, climate, blockchain and quantum.
Matt Golden, founder and managing partner, started the Toronto-based firm in 2011 and amassed a team, including Ameet Shah, general partner, and new principal Nick Chen.
“This is a continuation of our core thesis and created to be super founder-aligned,” Golden told TechCrunch. “Ameet and I are both ex-founders. Our first fund was more mobile-focused, which was more a function of our domain expertise in 2011.”
Since then, the firm shifted to being sector agnostic and later more focused on the Canadian tech ecosystem, which Golden described as having “great trajectory.” A majority of Golden Ventures’ investments have been in this ecosystem with the remaining in other areas.
The firm makes both core investments and those that lean more on the angel side. In previous funds, the firm invested in 25 core deals and Golden expects to make more like 30 core deals with the fifth fund.
Over 13 years, Golden Ventures has backed over 100 companies at the seed stage. The firm has also worked to invest in talent, mentorship and building relationships with later-stage funds so that portfolio companies can have access to downstream funding.
Some of its portfolio exits include storytelling platform Wattpad, which was acquired by Naver, and SkipTheDishes, an online ordering platform acquired by Just Eat. It is also an investor in Brightwheel, a SaaS tool for daycares; Float, a spend automation company; and Xanadu, a company producing a universal quantum processor; and Horizon, which provides a scalable Ethereum architecture for the development of decentralized games.
“We used to say we invest in everything from temporary tattoos to photonic-based quantum computing chips,” Shah told TechCrunch. “Everything that we built is to focus on what value can we deliver to founders at the seed stage, and what value can be delivered to founders that are building outside of the ‘valley.’ They have nuanced needs in the valley. For example, there’s tons of talent, and if you’re looking at building and scaling, you have to be more deliberate about your talent strategy.”
Golden Ventures has not made any investments yet out of the fifth fund, as it is still investing from its fourth fund of $100 million raised in 2021.
Golden Ventures V is backed by a group of existing institutional limited partners, including BDC Capital, ECMC Group, Foundry, HarbourVest Partners, Kensington Capital Partners, Northleaf Capital Partners, RBC, Teralys Capital, University of Chicago and Vintage Investment Partners, and new institutional partner Deloitte Ventures.
