Intelligent knowledge base startup Golden Recursion Inc. said today it has raised $14.5 million in new funding to build out its team, product capabilities and datasets.

The Series A round was led by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z and included DCVC, Gigafund, Harpoon Ventures, the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund, WndrCo, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Vela Partners, HNVR, Socii Capital and a range of individual investors. As part of the deal, Marc Andreessen has joined Golden’s board of directors.

Founded in 2017, Golden is a developer of a self-constructing knowledge database used to accelerate discovery and education. The company combines artificial intelligence, machine learning and human effort to make the process of gathering and communicating knowledge simpler.

The company’s goals are broad: It’s attempting to build an extensive database and graph of knowledge for humanity. Golden is also building commercials tools and community features to aid discovery on what it describes as the “world’s first self-constructing knowledge database built by artificial and human intelligence.”

“The big vision is we’re trying to build a big database of knowledge and this is across everything eventually,” Chief Executive Officer Jude Gomila told Crunchbase News.

Fulfillment of the vision may be some time off, however. While the ambition is certainly there, the knowledge database is still under development.

The first prompted topic when exploring Golden is artificial intelligence: The user is presented an extensive list of topics, subtopics and other related grounds such as deep learning frameworks. The word framework is relevant here, since many of the presented links deliver pages with little to no data in them.

Notably, at least on the artificial intelligence page, most of the content appears to have come from human contributors. Given the way topics are structured and presentation differs, the obvious parallel is Wikipedia. On company profile pages, for example, the page for Mercury Technologies Inc., the parallel is PitchBook or Crunchbase.

To be fair, some topics are more populated than others. Golden also announced along with the funding that it has landed a $1 million contract with the U.S. Air Force to help fight COVID-19 with information and knowledge derived from fragmented public sources — a definite vote of confidence in what the company is developing.

Including the new funding, Golden has raised $19.5 million to date.

Image: Golden