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 contributors Daniel Vigovszky and Afsal Thaj. The first prototype was hacked together in Inverness, Scotland, proving that durable execution of WebAssembly components was possible — extending ZIO Flow's resilient-workflow ideas beyond the JVM.
The open-source Golem runtime followed shortly after, with development happening publicly on GitHub. Golem Cloud, Inc. was incorporated in 2024, and the managed Cloud service launched into Developer Preview the same year.
Today, the Golem runtime is open-source under BUSL-1.1. 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.
Afsal Thaj
Co-founder. Longtime OSS contributor across the ZIO ecosystem, with a focus on production reliability and distributed-system semantics.
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.