Private company

Golden Software

Logo: goldensoftware.com3

Software company1

Golden Software LLC is a privately held, American company based in Golden, Colorado. It develops and markets a small catalog of GIS and scientific software. Founded in 1983, Golden Software was the first to market three-dimensional surface and contour mapping applications for the PC.2 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

1983Founded1

Golden Software LLC is a privately held, American company based in Golden, Colorado. It develops and markets a small catalog of GIS and scientific software.2

The story

Patrick Madison, a CSM computer science instructor, and Dan Smith, a graduate student, began a partnership in 1983 with the development of a printer interface language that took advantage of the full resolution available to dot-matrix printers.

Their first commercial program, PlotCall, transformed plotter instructions into dot-matrix instructions compatible with over 20 commercial printers. This opened the computer graphing and mapping market to the wider arena of users with inexpensive commercial printers.

Between 1985 and 1986 the company released two DOS applications: Surfer, a surface and contour mapping program, and Grapher, a spreadsheet-plotting application.

In 1990 it released its first Windows program: MapViewer. Their next product, Didger was released in 1996.

Strater, a subsurface log and cross section plotting application, and Voxler, a 3D well and volumetric data visualization application, began shipping in 2004 and 2006 respectively.

In October 2014, General Manager Blakelee Mills became CEO of Golden Software. Patrick Madison remained the company's President, and Dan Smith remained the lead developer.

Golden Software released its newest product, Raster Tools in April 2016. Raster Tools is an add-in for Esri's ArcMap that creates raster data sets from XYZ data.

From Wikipedia’s article on Golden Software, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4

Products and brands

  • geographic information systems software

Listed on Wikidata.1

Timeline

  1. 1983Founded Founded1

Funding

Where the company's money came from, by calendar year: private offerings filed with the SEC, federal grants, loans, contracts and other assistance from USAspending.gov, and PPP loans from the SBA. Each bar links to the records below.

Money received by year$178.7K 2020–2020
Money received by yearMoney received by year, 2020–2020: $178.7K in all. PPP loans $178.7K.$0$50K$100K$150K$200K2020 · PPP loans: $178.7K2020
Figures by year
YearPPP loansTotal
2020$178.7K$178.7K

PPP loans

Paycheck Protection Program loans of $150,000 and up, approved April 2020 to July 2021, from the SBA5. Matched to this company by name and state.

  1. Apr 15, 2020$178.7K PPP loan (first draw) from Mountain View Bank of Commerce5To GOLDEN SOFTWARE LLC, Golden CO; $179.9K forgiven Feb 12, 2021

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

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    Company websiteGolden Software logo
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