Ohio State University leaders broke ground Tuesday on the Timashev Technology Tower, an eight-story building on the university’s west campus Innovation District that is designed to give Columbus-born startups, university spinouts and industry partners a permanent home together. Ratmir Timashev and his wife, Angela, joined university and state leaders at the Oct. 20 ceremony for the planned 103,000-square-foot tower, which is expected to open in September 2028.
The tower grows out of the Timashev Family Foundation’s $110 million gift to Ohio State in 2023, a record-setting donation that established a new center and interdisciplinary program focused on software innovation. Three years later, that commitment is taking physical form, with a building university officials say will house community-led and university-born startups alongside established industry partners working in the same hallways.
Ohio State Interim Provost Trevor Brown said at the groundbreaking that the new tower will be a place where technology and life sciences converge. University President Ravi Bellamkonda said the space will serve as a physical representation of Ohio State’s commitment to entrepreneurship, adding that the place matters in creating an ecosystem for innovation in Columbus.
The project also answers a practical bottleneck that has pushed some Ohio ideas out of state. Tyler Allchin, managing director of healthcare at JobsOhio, said the tower will dramatically increase the amount of wet lab space available to companies that need hands-on life science research facilities, noting that promising ideas conceived in Ohio have too often left the state to grow because that kind of lab space was not available here.
For Timashev, a co-founder of Veeam Software who built his career in Columbus after arriving as a graduate student, the tower is part of a longer push to see Columbus become a high-tech center in its own right. In his own account of the project, he has described a city with the raw materials, talent and grit to become an innovation powerhouse, and the new building as a chapter in proving it.
The Innovation District setting puts the tower alongside the university’s other major west campus investments, including the new Wexner Medical Center hospital tower, reinforcing a corridor where research, medicine and new companies are being built within walking distance of one another. Officials said the mix is deliberate: startups need customers, collaborators and talent close at hand, and the district is being assembled to provide all three.
Construction will proceed toward the September 2028 opening, when the tower’s labs, offices and gathering spaces are expected to begin filling with the startups and partners the center was created to serve. For central Ohio’s growing technology community, Tuesday’s groundbreaking marked the moment a record gift stopped being a promise and started becoming a building.