On a sunny spring day at an upscale French restaurant in Greenwich, Connecticut, Ratmir Timashev is animatedly explaining his latest venture in a place far removed from his tony surroundings: Columbus, Ohio. Clad in a cream hoodie and white polo, the 59-year-old billionaire software entrepreneur launches into a pitch for why he wants to make Ohio’s capital the latest AI boomtown in America.

“I’m a scientist by background. I like experiments,” he says. “So this is my experiment, to make Columbus the next Silicon Valley—America’s innovation hub.”

It’s somewhat of a contrarian take. While AI startups are proliferating and valuations are booming, much of that wealth and creative destruction is happening on the coasts—not in Columbus, which is better known for housing healthcare and insurance firms than cutting-edge tech. The city ranked 29th—behind other college towns like Ann Arbor, Michigan and Gainesville, Florida but ahead of places like Pittsburgh and St. Louis—in a 2025 study of the top AI metro areas by the nonprofit Brookings Institute, which also named it one of 28 “star hubs.”

Timashev is planning to invest $100 million over five years to turn his vision into reality. In February, he launched Oh.io, a venture capital firm that aims to bring 100 AI startups to Columbus. Unlike most VC funds that simply write a check, Oh.io’s plan is to hire and pay for entire sales and marketing teams for participating startups for 18 to 24 months—as long as they establish a base in Columbus. In return, the firm gets the option to invest at a lower valuation if that period is successful. The goal is to bring growth-stage startups with $1-5 million in revenue from elsewhere in the U.S., plus Europe and Israel, to Columbus and help them scale up. So far he’s signed up 8 startups, hailing from San Francisco to Switzerland—but is also facing a bitter legal battle with three former executives who claim he fired them in April.

“We are a partner, we have skin in the game,” he says, preferring to call it a “performance venture platform” rather than a VC firm. “We build a team for you and the team is yours after that. Our goal is that teams will stay and grow in Columbus, so we bring great startups [there.] It doesn’t have to be the headquarters—management can stay in Israel or London or San Francisco, that’s fine—but the sales and marketing operations for North America will be headquartered in Columbus.”

The Russian-born billionaire’s life has been intertwined with Ohio since the early 1990s, when he first moved to the U.S. in 1992 at age 26 to pursue graduate studies in chemical physics at Ohio State. He then cofounded two software companies in Columbus, including data management giant Veeam, which he and his partner Andrei Baronov sold to VC firm Insight Partners for $5 billion in 2020. Thanks to that sale plus his venture capital investments, Timashev is worth an estimated $5.4 billion. He’s also pledged some $150 million to his American alma mater including a $110 million donation in 2020 to establish a new center for software innovation—a gift that broke the previous record set by another notable alumnus, the Epstein-tarnished retail billionaire and major local philanthropist Les Wexner. (Wexner has said he cut off ties with Epstein in 2007.)

Timashev’s also working with the Columbus Partnership, a group of about 80 local CEOs focused on economic development that Wexner cofounded in 2002 and Timashev joined earlier this year to advance his goal. “He deeply believes the region has what it takes to become the big tech startup, entrepreneurial hub for the Midwest and he wants to put his money and his time........

© Forbes