Golden funding round, May 2019

On April, 30 2019, Golden Recursion, Inc. announced that it had raised $5 million in seed funding.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the round, and the firm's co-founding partner, Marc Andreessen, represented a16z on the transaction.

The deal saw participation from institutional investors Gigafund (represented by partner Stephen Oskoui), Founders Fund (represented by Cyan Banister and Luke Nosek), SV Angel, Liquid 2 Ventures (represented by founding partner Joe Montana).

Participating angel investors included:

• Aston Motes – Employee #1 at Dropbox.
• Christina Broadbeck – YouTube's first in-house designer.
• Lee Linden – Current managing partner of Quiet Capital; Linden previously founded ContestMachine (YC S'07), Tapjoy, and Karma (acquired by Facebook)
• Immad Akhund – Current CEO of neobank Mercury who previously was co-founder of Heyzap alongside Golden's founder and CEO Jude Gomila. Heyzap was sold to programmatic advertising firm Fyber for $45 million in late 2015.
• Josh Buckley – Co-founder of Mino Games, angel investor, and member of the boards of directors of Clearbit and NexHealth.
• Howie Liu – Co-founder and CEO of Airtable. Liu previously founded CRM syncing system Etacts (acquired by Salesforce).
• James Smith – Co-founder and CEO of code exception tracking software company Bugsnag. Smith served as CTO of Heyzap from 2009 through 2012.
• James Tamplin – Previously co-founder and CEO of Firebase (acquired by Google) and venture partner at Founder Collective. Tamplin joined Covid Act Now as COO in March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated.
• Jack Smith – Previously co-founder of Shyp and Vungle (acquired by Blackstone Group for $750 million in July 2019). Smith advises and invests in startups including The Hustle, UJET, and Survios.
• Mike Einziger – Grammy-nominated multi-instrumental musician playing with the band Incubus.
• Paul McKellar – Member of Square's founding team.
• Trip Adler – Co-founder and CEO of Scribd.