Golden Ventures secures one other $100M to spend money on Canada’s tech ecosystem

Golden Ventures, a Canada-based enterprise capital agency, closed on over $100 million in capital commitments for its fifth fund focusing on high-potential, seed-stage founders working throughout applied sciences, together with AI, local weather, blockchain and quantum.

Matt Golden, founder and managing companion, began the Toronto-based agency in 2011 and amassed a workforce, together with Ameet Shah, basic companion, and new principal Nick Chen.

“This can be a continuation of our core thesis and created to be tremendous founder-aligned,” Golden informed Information World. “Ameet and I are each ex-founders. Our first fund was extra mobile-focused, which was extra a perform of our area experience in 2011.”

Since then, the agency shifted to being sector agnostic and later extra targeted on the Canadian tech ecosystem, which Golden described as having “nice trajectory.” A majority of Golden Ventures’ investments have been on this ecosystem with the remaining in different areas.

The agency makes each core investments and people who lean extra on the angel aspect. In earlier funds, the agency invested in 25 core offers and Golden expects to make extra like 30 core offers with the fifth fund.

Over 13 years, Golden Ventures has backed over 100 corporations on the seed stage. The agency has additionally labored to spend money on expertise, mentorship and constructing relationships with later-stage funds in order that portfolio corporations can have entry to downstream funding.

A few of its portfolio exits embrace storytelling platform Wattpad, which was acquired by Naver, and SkipTheDishes, a web based ordering platform acquired by Simply Eat. Additionally it is an investor in Brightwheel, a SaaS device for daycares; Float, a spend automation firm; and Xanadu, an organization producing a common quantum processor; and Horizon, which offers a scalable Ethereum structure for the event of decentralized video games.

“We used to say we spend money on all the pieces from short-term tattoos to photonic-based quantum computing chips,” Shah informed Information World. “Every part that we constructed is to concentrate on what worth can we ship to founders on the seed stage, and what worth may be delivered to founders which are constructing outdoors of the ‘valley.’ They’ve nuanced wants within the valley. For instance, there’s tons of expertise, and for those who’re taking a look at constructing and scaling, it’s important to be extra deliberate about your expertise technique.”

Golden Ventures has not made any investments but out of the fifth fund, as it’s nonetheless investing from its fourth fund of $100 million raised in 2021.

Golden Ventures V is backed by a bunch of present institutional restricted companions, together with BDC Capital, ECMC Group, Foundry, HarbourVest Companions, Kensington Capital Companions, Northleaf Capital Companions, RBC, Teralys Capital, College of Chicago and Classic Funding Companions, and new institutional companion Deloitte Ventures.