Our story
Golem began in March 2023, when John A. De Goes — mathematician, open-source advocate, and creator of ZIO — joined forces with longtime OSS contributor Daniel Vigovszky and a small-hand picked team. The first prototype was hacked together in Inverness, Scotland, proving that transparent durable execution of WASM was possible — extending ZIO Flow's resilient-workflow ideas beyond the JVM.
The first developer preview release of Golem followed later that year, on August 1, 2023. In 2024, Golem Cloud Inc. was officially incorporated, and the source code to Golem went public, leading to the first stable (if still primitive) release of Golem on August 23, 2024.
As the Golem team tirelessly worked on improving usability, John recognized that the key strengths of Golem — transparent durable execution, entity-orientation, formally-verified and cheap sandboxing — all made Golem an incredibly compelling package to developers building agentic applications. So in May 2025, Golem began specializing for AI applications, leaving the broader durable execution market to well-established and mature solutions like Temporal.
Today, the Golem runtime is open-source under BUSL-1.1, transitioning to Apache 2. The Cloud service remains in Developer Preview; paid general availability with formal SLAs and data-retention guarantees is planned for Q3 2026.
Founders
John A. De Goes
CEO and co-founder. Creator of ZIO, the open-source effect system that's been running in production at companies across fintech, ad tech, and AI infrastructure for the better part of a decade. Mathematician, open-source advocate, and longtime distributed-systems builder.
Daniel Vigovszky
Co-founder. Veteran open-source contributor with deep roots in functional programming, runtime design, and WebAssembly tooling.
The team
We're a small, globally distributed team building Golem in the open. The runtime is written primarily in Rust; the SDKs span TypeScript, Rust, Scala, and MoonBit; and contributions come from developers across more than a dozen countries through GitHub and our Discord.
Want to get involved? The fastest paths in are contributing on GitHub or joining the conversation on Discord.