After 13 years in the U.S. Timashev returned to Russia in 2005 but didn’t like what Putin was doing to the country. He returned to the U.S. in 2014 after a four-year stint in Switzerland. Says he, “You can go to Germany or Britain and build your own business, but you will never be German or British. But you will become American if you share our values.”

Jake Rosenberg for Forbes

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.”

Jake Rosenberg for forbes

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 behind that vision,” says Jason Hall, CEO of the Columbus Partnership. “It’s a place he’s attached to emotionally and that he feels gave him so much and the success that he’s enjoyed.”

Despite its size relative to larger AI boomtowns, Hall points to other strengths Columbus has: It’s one of the largest data center hubs in the country; it boasts a sprawling, $28 billion Intel semiconductor manufacturing campus named the “Silicon Heartland”; and it’s also home to five of the 500 largest American companies by revenue including Vertiv, a major provider of cooling and power infrastructure for data centers.

For Timashev, the missing ingredient is startup founders. “Columbus has great industries like retail, insurance and banking, it has lots of healthcare and pharma startups,” he says, rattling off a list of corporations headquartered in the Buckeye State’s capital. “But what’s missing is entrepreneurship.”

Long before he set foot in Columbus, Timashev was born in 1966 in the similarly-sized industrial city of Ufa in the Soviet Union. His parents, both engineers, encouraged him to pursue science. As a teenager he wanted to become an ice hockey player, but they wouldn’t let him, so he buried himself in studying physics instead.

“I always compare Ufa with Columbus because it’s very similar,” he says. “People are hardworking and have good values.”

The Soviet Union was nearing collapse when he graduated from the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology (MIPT)—known as Russia’s equivalent of MIT—in 1990 with a master’s in physics. He then started his PhD and worked as a researcher but it wasn’t enough to support his young family. So he picked up odd gigs on the weekends and summers, fixing roofs, cleaning windows and working small construction jobs: “In one summer I made more money than my dad did in 10 years.”

In 1992, a year after Russia removed border controls, Timashev seized the opportunity to go to the U.S. for a shot at the American dream. “ ‘I said, ‘I need to go to America now, otherwise I’ll never have this opportunity,’ ” he recalls. “I just needed to go and learn the fundamentals of capitalism and entrepreneurship.”

He was recruited to Ohio State by Terry Miller, a professor who had started bringing in Russian students a year earlier for his chemical physics lab, which had become one of the best in the country at the time. There was just one issue: Timashev’s English wasn’t good enough for admission.

“Columbus is a great city with great talent and infrastructure, but maybe not paying L.A., San Francisco or New York prices.”

Jason Luo, CEO of Newo

“There were a lot of bright people in the Soviet Union and they didn’t have a place to go because the economy had collapsed. We got several applications from [Russia], and Ratmir was outstanding,” says Miller. He eventually convinced the dean that Timashev could pass the English exam by his second semester, which he did. “After that, I felt pretty confident that this was a good gamble.”

Timashev’s first foray into business was in 1993, when he was still pursuing a second master’s at Ohio State. He was contacted by some old classmates of MIPT still in Russia who wanted him to help export computer parts from the U.S. for early adopters back home who were building computers themselves. Still on a student visa, he couldn’t get directly involved, but he helped them hire a few employees and manage the export business.

By 1996, with an Ohio State master’s and green card in hand, he was ready to make the jump himself. He teamed up with Andrei Baronov, a former MIPT friend also in the U.S., and launched an online computer parts store. Within a year, they had launched Aelita Software—named after a 1924 Soviet science fiction film—which provided systems management tools for firms that used Microsoft Windows.

After bootstrapping it for five years from Columbus and winning over clients including Bristol-Myers Squibb and HP, they sold one-third of the firm to New York-based VC firm Insight Partners for $10 million in 2002 and two years later sold Aelita to publicly traded Quest Software for $115 million. Next up: Veeam, which specialized in data protection and backup for users of VMWare, a fast-growing cloud computing giant whose corporate clients included Google.

By then, the two college friends had become a well-oiled team. Baronov was the software guru, Timashev the sales genius. While running Veeam remotely, Baronov relocated to Switzerland and Timashev to Russia, where he hoped he could bring American-style capitalism to his home country. That dream didn’t last long, with Timashev joining Baronov in Switzerland in 2010: “I realized that I didn’t like the country that Putin [was] building,” he says.

“From the beginning, Ratmir and I understood who did what, so our ‘lanes’ have always been clear,” Baronov told Ohio State Alumni Magazine in 2023. (He did not respond to requests for an interview.) Adds Timashev: “I’m very entrepreneurial. He’s a genius, but very conservative, so it’s a good match. I have 10 ideas in one day and if I repeat the same idea for three months, then he starts listening.”

Timashev returned to the U.S., settling in posh Greenwich, Conn. in 2014, running the company from Columbus. By 2019, Veeam hit $1 billion in sales and Insight led a $500 million funding round alongside the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. A year later, Timashev and Baronov sold the entire company to Insight for $5 billion.

“Ratmir and Andrei are among the most successful entrepreneurs we’ve had the privilege to partner with,” says Jeff Horing, cofounder and managing director of Insight Partners. “Aelita was a landmark outcome for Insight during a difficult period for the technology market, and Veeam is a marquee business in our portfolio.”

Timashev and Baronov both sold their stakes to Insight but retained an interest in a future sale of the company. Newly flush with cash, Timashev upped his giving to the city that had given him so much. That June, he gave $17 million to Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences to build a new music building and renovate the chemistry lab. (He had already given $5 million to endow a scholarship in honor of his professor, Terry Miller, in 2016.)

In 2023, he gave $110 million to establish the Center for Software Innovation, which brings together Ohio State’s engineering and business schools to offer new academic courses and industry experience for students who want to become software entrepreneurs. It also comes with a new research and entrepreneurship building that will form part of Ohio State’s innovation district, a sprawling development on more than 350 acres that’s attracted $900 million in public and private investment.

“He’s a builder at heart,” says Shereen Agrawal, the center’s executive director. “He has a vision and genuine desire to see Columbus and central Ohio grow as a tech hub.”

Next came conversations with the Columbus Partnership in the summer of 2025. Oh.io launched in February, promising to help participating startups pitch their services to major employers who are also members of the Columbus Partnership, including healthcare services giant Cardinal Health and insurance titan Nationwide. “That’s a big value proposition,” says Timashev. “We will help you find your first customer.” New York-based software testing platform Testkube, which Timashev has also invested in, won over one of the world’s largest auto manufacturers thanks to the Oh.io sales team, which makes up roughly a quarter of Testkube’s entire workforce.

Another big draw: affordability. “Columbus is a great city with great talent and infrastructure, but maybe not paying L.A., San Francisco or New York prices,” says Jason Luo, the CEO of San Francisco-based AI receptionist startup Newo, which is part of Oh.io and raised a $25 million Series A funding round in February led by Timashev.

Timashev knows his idea has a long way to go before becoming what he envisions. “I’ve always been asked, ‘can Columbus become like Silicon Valley?’ ” he says. “When people in Columbus start bragging about our startups, then we’ll become another Silicon Valley. To do that, we need to have really big successes. We need to have a Google or an OpenAI in Columbus making billions [of dollars] so that all the young people want to repeat it.”

Already the project has hit a snag. Three of its leaders—then-CEO Jeff Schumann and executives Kevin Colón and Seth Metcalf—alleged in April that they had been fired and filed a lawsuit against Timashev and Oh.io for fraud, breach of contract and civil conspiracy. Their complaint claims that Timashev went back on promises to give them a 10% carry interest in the fund and also pivoted from an ambitious plan to draw startups to Columbus, instead focusing on a “struggling portfolio of companies” that Timashev had previously invested in.

“There were commitments made that were being abandoned,” says Schumann. “We were fired when we started asking questions about whether or not those commitments would be honored.”

A spokesperson for Oh.io told Forbes that “legal proceedings initiated by prior management will play out in the courts and we are confident we will be vindicated” and that the firm will “respond aggressively through all legal and appropriate means, uncowed by threats or meritless allegations.” The case is ongoing in Ohio, and Timashev and Oh.io have filed a federal suit against Schumann, Colón and Metcalf, with the three countering with a separate defamation suit against Timashev and Oh.io in Ohio.

As the legal cases continue, Oh.io has elevated Alex Husted, Ohio State’s former director of capital and the son of Ohio Senator Jeff Husted, to venture partner. And it continues to look for new companies: the latest to join the program is Swiss identity security firm Saporo, the first participating startup in which Timashev hadn’t previously invested.

In the meantime, it will take at least another 18 months to see if Oh.io’s promise will bear fruit for its first class of startups, and many more years for Columbus to emerge as an AI hub that could compete with the likes of San Francisco and New York. But for Timashev, if you can make it in Ohio, you can make it anywhere—and his own story is proof of that. “I always say I got lucky three times,” he says. “I was born in a good family, I went to MIPT and then I came to America.”

Here he found unmatched opportunity. “The U.S. is the country where I feel the most comfortable in terms of shared values,” says Timashev, who renounced his Russian citizenship in 2024 and became an American a year later. “I believe in capitalism and free enterprise. The U.S. is successful because it attracts people that are on the move and want to achieve something in their life.”

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