Homegrown Scaling: RWX Inks OH.io’s first columbus partnership

Columbus’ bid to become an AI hub just scaled closer to home. Cloud computing platform RWX has formalized and expanded its partnership with OH.io, the performance venture platform launched by Veeam Software co‑founder and investor Ratmir Timashev. The expansion wires OH.io’s embedded go‑to‑market model directly into a Columbus-based developer infrastructure company that is optimizing CI/CD workflows for human engineers and AI coding agents working side by side.

Why it matters

This marks OH.io’s first partnership with a homegrown, Columbus-based startup. The milestone follows the firm's high-profile May agreement anchoring Swiss cybersecurity startup Saporo’s North American base in Central Ohio. By expanding its portfolio locally, OH.io is validating the elite engineering talent already operating inside Central Ohio and signals that global-scale B2B software infrastructure can be built directly from the region's existing ecosystem.

The operational playbook

Under the expanded agreement, OH.io will embed its own veteran go‑to‑market and demand‑generation operators directly into RWX’s top‑of‑funnel engine—owning awareness, marketing programs, and lead‑generation workflows. The model lets RWX’s engineering team remain deliberately isolated from go‑to‑market friction, focusing on product development and infrastructure performance while OH.io runs the revenue machine.

The move follows a quiet but successful trial in which OH.io built out RWX’s initial top‑of‑funnel demand strategy before formalizing the partnership. “We ran a pilot, the demand was real, and we are expanding because the model worked,” said Alex Purtell, Director of Demand Generation at OH.io.

How the sales model works

True to Timashev’s performance‑venture model—backed by a $100 million personal commitment—OH.io absorbs much of the payroll and execution risk of scaling RWX’s sales engine in exchange for a revenue‑share agreement rather than traditional startup equity. That structure flips the usual script for young SaaS companies: instead of trading ownership for capital and then building commercial teams in‑house, RWX brings in operators who are financially aligned with revenue outcomes from day one.

The technical backdrop

Founded by Dan Manges (former CTO of Braintree and co-founder of insurance unicorn Root) and Tommy Graves, RWX is building infrastructure for the next generation of software development. Backed by a $7 million seed round in 2024, the company recently rolled out a content‑cached container builder designed to cut Docker image assembly times by up to 10x, attacking one of the slowest parts of modern CI/CD workflows.

As software engineering shifts toward an “agentic model”—where autonomous AI coding agents write and modify software alongside human engineers—traditional, sluggish pipelines become a bottleneck. RWX’s platform is engineered to handle the speed, test coverage, and validation checks required when humans and AI code together, giving teams a cloud environment where both engineers and AI agents can build, test, and ship at the pace AI now enables.

Between the lines

For Manges, keeping the expansion local was a major selling point. “OH.io took on the hardest part of scaling a company and shared the risk with us while we stayed focused on the product,” he said. “Doing this with a partner in our own city, who has operated at scale before, made the decision easy.” 

For Timashev—and for the broader Ohio tech ecosystem—the RWX deal moves OH.io closer to its ambitious five‑year goal: anchoring roughly 100 high‑growth software and AI startups in Central Ohio and generating around 2,000 regional tech jobs. “RWX is exactly the kind of company OH.io was built to back, and it is right here in Columbus,” Timashev said. “I’m proud to put our team behind Dan and the RWX product.”