Golden Venturesa Canadian-based venture capital firm, has closed more than $100 million in capital commitments for its fifth fund targeting high-potential, early-stage founders working in technologies including AI, climate, blockchain and quantum.
Matt Golden, founder and managing partner, launched the Toronto-based firm in 2011 and assembled a team including Ameet Shah, general partner, and new director Nick Chen.
“This is a continuation of our core thesis and was created to be highly aligned with the founders,” Golden told TechCrunch. “Ameet and I are both ex-founders. Our first fund was more focused on mobile, which was more a function of our domain expertise in 2011.”
Since then, the company has transitioned to being industry agnostic and later focused more on the Canadian tech ecosystem, which Golden described as having “great momentum.” The majority of Golden Ventures’ investments were made in this ecosystem and the rest in other areas.
The firm makes both core and angel-leaning investments. In previous funds, the firm invested in 25 key deals, and Golden expects to do more than 30 key deals with the fifth fund.
Over 13 years, Golden Ventures has supported more than 100 early stage companies. The firm has also worked to invest in talent, mentoring and building relationships with later-stage funds so that portfolio companies can access 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. He is also an investor in Brightwheel, a SaaS tool for daycares. Float, an expense automation company. and Xanadu, a company producing a universal quantum processor. and Horizon, which provides a scalable Ethereum architecture for developing decentralized games.
“We used to say we were investing in everything from temporary tattoos to quantum computing chips with photonics,” Shah told TechCrunch. “Everything we’ve built is to focus on what value we can deliver to seed-stage founders and what value can be delivered to founders building outside of the ‘valley.’ They have different needs in the valley. For example, there’s too much talent, and if you’re looking at building and scaling, you need to be more careful about your talent strategy.”
Golden Ventures has yet to make investments from the fifth fund as it is still investing from the 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 partners Deloitte Ventures.
