INNOVATION INTERVIEW SPOTLIGHT

RATMIR TIMASHEV

Co-Founder & CEO
Veeam Software

Co-Founder & CEO
Aelita Software

Co-Founder
Object First

Chair
Timashev Family Foundation

Ratmir Timashev is a globally recognized entrepreneur, technologist and philanthropist. He is the founder of Veeam Software — the global leader in cloud data protection and management software, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, as well as the Kubeshop software incubator. Today, he lives in Greenwich, Connecticut with his family.

Ratmir was born in 1966 in the city of Ufa, the capital of the Bashkortostan region in Russia. Surrounded by music and the arts growing up, his family was full of engineers. Ratmir later decided to pursue higher education studies in the 1980s in Physics and attended the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, graduating in 1990 with a Master’s degree in physics.

Motivated to complete his Ph.D., Ratmir was recruited into the Chemical Physics Ph.D. program at Ohio State University (OSU) in 1992. Dr. Terry Miller, the program’s chair who spearheaded bringing Ratmir to the United States, soon grew close with Ratmir and became a trusted mentor for many years. In 1996, Ratmir graduated from OSU with a Master’s in Chemical Physics.

Throughout his studies, Ratmir had been intimately drawn to entrepreneurship and to the burgeoning world of the internet and its many opportunities. He launched several businesses to support his growing family, including in computer parts and sales. These early ventures would spark Ratmir’s interest and creativity in launching global brands in the early days of the internet.

A thought leader on all matters tied to business, technology, and leadership, Ratmir is an active voice online. He comments on the latest developments and shares insights on LinkedIn. Ratmir is a member of the Fast Company Impact Council, an invitation-only network of leaders and executives that meets throughout the year to discuss issues of importance in business and society.

While still a Ph.D. student at Ohio State, Timashev co-founded Aelita Software in 1997, an enterprise network management company, with his best friend from home Andrei Baronov. Baranov joined Ratmir in Columbus, Ohio that year, and the two friends led the company through double-digit growth, year-over-year. Focused on Windows Server systems management and monitoring software, Aelita Software grew to $30 million in sales over its first eight years. At the beginning of 2004, the company was sold to its prime competitor, Quest Software, for about $115 million. Ratmir had become a General Manager at Quest Software, responsible for the new Windows Enterprise Management business unit. He left Quest Software at the beginning of 2005.

Later that year, Ratmir began realizing the potential of virtualization technologies. He and Andrei decided to do something similar to what they had done for Windows NT, but for the virtual environment instead. In 2006, Ratmir started a new company that he named Veeam Software. The company’s first products were designed for managing and monitoring the VMware ESX virtualization platform. In 2008, it released a backup tool called Veeam Backup & Replication, which soon became Veeam's flagship product and helped the company enter the backup market. By the end of 2015, Veeam Software employed more than 1,950 people worldwide and reported $474 million in revenue. Under the leadership of Ratmir and its executive team, the company also launched “Veeam Cares”—the company’s philanthropic organization that promotes and leverages the team’s expansive volunteerism across the globe.

In March of 2020, Insight Partners acquired 100% ownership of Veeam for $5 billion. The acquisition allowed Veeam to continue its expansion of offices to 30 countries and to serve customers in over 160 countries.