Neil Rimer is a Swiss-Canadian venture capitalist and the founding partner at Index Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in technology startups across Europe, the United States, and Israel. He is also the co-chair of the board of directors at Human Rights Watch. Rimer has been a prominent figure in European technology investing since the early 1990s, backing companies such as Skype, Supercell, and Wiz.
Early life and education
Rimer was born in Montreal, Quebec, and was raised and educated in Geneva, Switzerland, attending the International School of Geneva. He received a bachelor's degree in History and Economics from Stanford University and was a General Course student at the London School of Economics. After his first job with Montgomery Securities, an investment bank in San Francisco, he earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School. He then chose to return to Europe, later telling Fortune, "I was excited about the idea of participating in the birth of the VC industry in Europe."
Career at Index Ventures
In 1991, soon after returning to Geneva, Rimer helped his father Gerald exit the bond trading business he had founded. Over the following years, he connected institutional investors with European technology startups, an effort that evolved into the official launch of Index Ventures. In 1996, Rimer co-founded Index Ventures in Geneva with his brother David and Giuseppe Zocco, raising an initial pilot fund of $17 million, followed by a $180 million fund in 1998. Early investments included SCM Microsystems (now Identiv) and Virata, a chipmaker that later merged with GlobeSpan in a $1.3 billion deal. Index began investing in Israeli companies in 2003, and by 2007 Rimer told The Wall Street Journal that "the bulk of our portfolio is in Europe and Israel."
Notable investments under Rimer's leadership include Betfair (LSE: BET) and Skype, which was acquired by eBay for $2.6 billion and later by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. Index Ventures has invested in more than 20 Israeli companies, including MyHeritage, Outbrain, Lacoon, Adallom, Wiz, Capitolis, and Gong.io. Rimer has also served on the boards of Last.fm (acquired by CBS for $280 million), Ofoto (acquired by Kodak), Trolltech (acquired by Nokia for $153 million), Numerical Technologies (acquired by Synopsis for $250 million), Genmab, and StepStone. He has sat on the boards of Call9, Funding Circle, HouseTrip, MOO Print, PhotoBox, StackExchange, Supercell, Kaggle, Metromile, and The Climate Corporation (acquired by Monsanto for approximately $1.1 billion).
In 2013, Rimer headed the Index Ventures team that led a $130 million funding round in Supercell, a mobile game company that Forbes profiled in May 2013 with the question "Is This the Fastest-Growing Game Company Ever?" In October 2013, Softbank and GungHo Online Entertainment acquired 51% of Supercell for $1.53 billion. In November 2017, Rimer expressed concern that Europe could miss opportunities to build large companies like Amazon, Facebook, or Google if it could not attract the required talent. In April 2020, he became a member of the Taxfix board.
Awards and recognition
In 2017, Rimer was named the number one venture capitalist in Europe in Forbes' inaugural Midas List Europe. He was featured on the Forbes Global Midas list in 2018 and the 2018 New York Times list of top venture capitalists worldwide.
Philanthropy and non-profit involvement
Rimer is a member of the board of directors of Human Rights Watch (HRW), becoming Co-Chair in 2019, and is a founder of the Geneva Committee of HRW, which named Israel an "Apartheid State." He has served on the European Leadership Council of Harvard Business School and on the board of U.C. Sampdoria, a football club in the Italian Serie A. In January 2022, Rimer, together with his father and brothers, donated $13 million to McGill University for the modernization of the Leacock building and the establishment of the Institute for Indigenous Research and Knowledges, highlighting the lifelong impact of his parents' education at McGill.
AI-related investments
While Rimer's career has spanned diverse technology sectors, his firm has increasingly focused on Artificial intelligence and Machine learning startups. Index Ventures has backed companies such as AI21 Labs, Inflection AI, and Essential AI, reflecting a broader trend in venture capital toward Generative AI and Large language model technologies. These investments align with the growth of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind in the AI landscape, though Rimer's specific role in these deals is not publicly detailed.