Golden Ventures, a Canadian venture capital company, closed on nearly $100 million for its fifth fund targeting seed-stage innovators in AI, climate, blockchain, and quantum technologies.
Since 2011, founder and managing partner Matt Golden has led the Toronto-based business, which includes general partner Ameet Shah and new principle Nick Chen.
“This is a continuation of our core thesis and was created to be super founder-aligned,” Golden told Eltrys. Former founders Ameet and I. We concentrated our first fund on mobile in 2011 because of our domain knowledge.
Since then, the business has become industry-neutral and focused on the Canadian innovation environment, which Golden called a “great trajectory.” Golden Ventures invests mostly in this ecosystem.
The business invests in core and angel projects. Golden intends to make 30 core agreements with the fifth fund, up from 25 in prior funds.
For 13 years, Golden Ventures has seed-backed over 100 firms. The business has invested in talent, coaching, and ties with later-stage investors to help portfolio firms get downstream investment.
It sold the storytelling site Wattpad to Naver and the online ordering app SkipTheDishes to Just Eat. It also invests in Brightwheel, a childcare SaaS platform; Float, a spend automation firm; Xanadu, a universal quantum processor maker; and Horizon, a scalable Ethereum architecture for decentralized gaming.
“We used to say we invest in everything from temporary tattoos to photonic-based quantum computing chips,” Shah told Eltrys. Everything we designed focuses on what we can give to seed-stage companies and innovators outside the ‘valley.’ In the valley, their requirements vary. There’s plenty of talent, so if you’re growing and expanding, you need a purposeful talent plan.
Golden Ventures is currently investing from its $100 million 2021 fourth fund; therefore, it has not made any investments from the fifth fund.
Golden Ventures V is backed by BDC Capital, ECMC Group, Foundry, HarbourVest Partners, Kensington Capital Partners, Northleaf Capital Partners, RBC, Teralys Capital, the University of Chicago, Vintage Investment Partners, and Deloitte Ventures.
