Limelight Foundation

The Limelight Foundation is a Dutch independent philanthropic foundation (Stichting Limelight Foundation) established in March 2021 by John Caspers — co-founder and former innovation director at Adyen, the Amsterdam-based payments company that became one of Europe's most valuable technology companies following its 2018 IPO — in partnership with journalist and journalism scholar Merel Borger. Registered in the Netherlands as a stichting (foundation) under Chamber of Commerce number 82336350 and recognised as a Public Benefit Organisation (ANBI) by the Dutch tax authority, it operates under the stated mission of supporting a "strong and free ecosystem for independent quality information in the digital age." Limelight describes itself as Europe's leading journalism fund, strengthening the continent's information infrastructure through multi-year, flexible grantmaking.

Leadership: Hans Laroes (chair; former editor-in-chief of NOS, the Netherlands' public broadcaster) leads the board; Merel Borger serves as co-founder and board secretary; and Alinda Vermeer — former CEO of Media Defence, the press-freedom legal-aid organisation — directs day-to-day operations.

Two-pillar mandate

The foundation's grantmaking runs across two connected pillars. The first, public interest journalism, funds investigative and cross-border reporting, newsroom protection and resilience, and the broader enabling environment for independent media. Grantees in this pillar include OCCRP, Forbidden Stories, Bellingcat, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Investigate Europe, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism — with grant periods typically running 36 months. Limelight attributes €1.3 billion in taxes and penalties recouped and over €9.5 billion in seized assets and fines to the investigative work of its grantee network.

The second pillar, technology and the information infrastructure, covers accountability for harmful technologies, digital rights, and advocacy. Grantees here are the organisations that define the European grassroots AI-accountability and digital-rights field:

• Access Now — multi-year grant (Dec 2025–Nov 2028), supporting the global digital-rights organisation's Europe-facing work on platform accountability, AI regulation, and surveillance.
• European Digital Rights (EDRi) — multi-year grant (Jan 2025–Dec 2027), the Brussels-anchored civil-society network coordinating digital-rights advocacy across 40+ member organisations.
• Digital Freedom Fund — multi-year grant (Jan 2025–Dec 2027), Europe's pooled strategic-litigation vehicle for digital rights.
• Amnesty Tech — Amnesty International's technology and human rights programme (Sep 2023–Aug 2026), focused on AI accountability and algorithmic surveillance.
• Spyware Accountability Initiative — multi-year grant (Jul 2024–Jun 2027), tracking and countering commercial spyware targeting civil society.
• Bits of Freedom — the Netherlands' leading digital-rights organisation, representing grassroots advocacy at a national level.
• La Quadrature du Net — France's grassroots digital-rights and internet-freedoms collective.
• AI Forensics — a European organisation investigating and exposing AI systems' societal harms, with parliamentary and regulatory engagement.
• Qurium — digital security infrastructure for at-risk media (Dec 2023–Dec 2026).

The technology pillar's grantee footprint sits squarely within the make-AI-good movement's civil-society layer: strategic litigation funders, digital-rights membership networks, AI accountability researchers, and national grassroots organisations across multiple European jurisdictions.

Pooled philanthropic model

Limelight is explicitly a pooled-philanthropy vehicle. John Caspers' founding endowment provides the base, while named co-funders — the Hartwig Foundation, Tanka, PFC Family Office, and DoubleNature — each commit €200,000 or more annually. The foundation positions pooling as offering three advantages: discovery (leveraging sector expertise that individual donors lack), de-risking (distributing institutional risk to protect editorial independence), and scale (combining resources for portfolio-level impact). Grants are invitation-only — no open calls — selected through sustained relationship-building with organisations the foundation has vetted over time.

As of mid-2026, the foundation supports 55+ organisations with current multi-year funding, has backed 100+ organisations since founding in 2021, and has directed €6.5 million to Europe's information infrastructure in the current year (total disbursed since 2021: over €7.5 million). The stated long-term goal is a €150 million fund — the minimum Limelight calculates is required to sustain at least one independent newsroom in every European country over the next decade.

Position in the corpus funder slice

The Limelight Foundation fills a specific gap in the corpus's Netherlands funder coverage. Adessium Foundation represents a broad Dutch philanthropic portfolio spanning civil society, ecology, and social entrepreneurship; the Limelight Foundation is instead a dedicated information-infrastructure and digital-rights fund capitalised by a specific Adyen-era tech fortune. It is the corpus's first Dutch funder whose grantmaking is concentrated in European journalism infrastructure and digital-rights civil society, and the corpus's direct window onto the funding relationships linking European tech-fortune philanthropy to AI-accountability organisations (Access Now, EDRi's AI-Act engagement, Amnesty Tech's AI surveillance work, the Spyware Accountability Initiative) and strategic-litigation infrastructure (Digital Freedom Fund, Media Defence).