Matthews Rightmire

Matt Rightmire is a Venture Partner at Building Ventures, a Boston-based venture firm founded in 2017 that is one of the very few funds dedicated exclusively to the built environment across its full lifecycle. He describes his own edge as drawing on "the contacts and insights he gained from over a decade building companies in Silicon Valley followed by the last decade as an early-stage investor." He holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

His operating career began in the earliest days of the consumer internet — he joined Yahoo! in 1995, when the company was still pre-revenue, and spent roughly a decade building companies in Silicon Valley. He later served as Chief Operating Officer of Efficient Frontier, a venture-funded marketing-services company that applied portfolio-optimization techniques from financial markets to online advertising; Efficient Frontier was acquired by Adobe in 2012.

Rightmire then transitioned into venture investing as a member of the Built Environment Investment Team at Borealis Ventures, where he spent roughly a decade backing early-stage companies. During that period he was involved with a string of companies that reached successful exits — including Honest Buildings, Dyn, Flurry, Fieldlens, OmniEarth, Wingu, and Handmark. That built-environment specialization is now the core of his work at Building Ventures.

Beyond investing, Rightmire has been active in community and nonprofit leadership, including past board involvement with Grassroot Soccer and the Children's Literacy Foundation (CLiF), and ongoing engagement with the Entrepreneur's Foundation of New Hampshire.

• Invests at the seed and Series A stages, with the majority of capital deployed at seed, in companies transforming the built environment (design → build → operate → experience).
• Sector focus spans construction technology, real estate/PropTech, and AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) software — the same domains he backed at Borealis Ventures.
• Values founders who pair vision with tenacity; Building Ventures positions itself as a specialist partner that brings deep industry contacts and operating experience rather than generalist capital.
• His personal thesis leans on operator credibility: he emphasizes leveraging "the contacts and insights…gained from over a decade building companies in Silicon Valley followed by the last decade as an early-stage investor" — i.e., hands-on help plus a specialist network in a traditionally hard-to-penetrate industry.