What I found excited me. Cincinnati had clear aspirations to accelerate digital innovation through entrepreneurship, a deep philanthropic culture, and extraordinary assets: 150 major corporations across a range of sectors, strong research institutions, a scrappy startup community, a new fund of funds strategy, and a 32,000-square-foot historic building in the heart of Over-the-Rhine, a central, walkable convening space surrounded by small, owner-operated, and diverse businesses.
What was missing was the connective tissue. Each startup and owner-operated small business stood largely alone. There was no rallying cry, no flywheel, no predictable mechanism for the kinds of interactions that drive economic growth. The underpinnings for a sustainable ecosystem were available. What was needed was a plan for activation, and then the patient work of integrating each node.
Capital compounded the challenge. An angel network existed, but early-stage startups frequently fell off a cliff when product-market fit proved harder to achieve than anticipated. New builders struggled to access capital, customers, and mentors who had been through early-stage cycles before. BigCos and startups occupied different worlds entirely. The innovation potential was real, but it was sitting in silos.
Cintrifuse was created as a public-private partnership to change that. From the start, it was clear the work wasn’t about building new programs. It was about building the conditions for the right collisions and connections to happen.
Building Cintrifuse
The strategy had two interlocking parts.
The first was capital. Rather than recycling regional dollars, we designed The Syndicate Fund: a fund of funds that deployed $100 million from Cincinnati’s top BigCos as limited partners into high-quality, early-stage venture funds across San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Boulder, and Chicago. This was a deliberate national strategy. Investing regional dollars in proven venture funds outside Ohio gave our BigCos insider access to emergent technologies in their verticals. It gave our ecosystem builders direct relationships with the best fund managers in the country. And it gave our local entrepreneurs access to risk capital they would never have obtained from Cincinnati alone.
What made the Syndicate Fund more than a capital strategy was what it unlocked for BigCos on the other side of the equation. As LPs in early-stage funds, they gained direct access to the portfolios of some of the country’s best venture managers. They had a line of sight into the digital and transformational companies reshaping their industries. For large, established organizations that couldn’t build that innovation pipeline internally, it was a fundamentally different kind of value: not just writing a check, but gaining a seat at the table where the next wave of solutions was being architected from institutional capital from either coast.
The results were tangible. NaviStone — a Cincinnati startup on a solid growth path with a highly differentiated approach to direct mail solutions — needed a new round of institutional capital. Because Cintrifuse was an LP in a major San Francisco fund, we were able to introduce NaviStone directly to that fund’s GP. The fund manager invested and joined NaviStone’s board. He now visits Cincinnati regularly to meet other high-growth startups, mentors founders across the ecosystem, and pitches regional companies to his own portfolio network. One relationship, built through the Syndicate Fund, became a permanent bridge between Cincinnati and the national venture community.
The second part was collaboration. With 150 BigCos in the region, one-on-one startup matching wasn’t scalable. Instead, we built a pull strategy, hosting informal digital transformation meet-ups that brought in outside thought leaders and local entrepreneurs into the same room to discuss specific horizontal tech themes. The goal was to let BigCos self-select their interests and begin to see startups as problem solvers rather than as sponsorship obligations. We invited analysts like Michael Krigsman and Ray Wang, along with entrepreneurs, academics, and government leaders, to share perspectives on tech priorities shaping their industries. BigCos could listen, identify where their challenges aligned with startup solutions, and move toward engagement on their own terms rather than being pushed into premature partnerships.
When CVG Airport’s Chief Innovation Officer Brian Cobb connected with Losant CEO Charlie Key through Cintrifuse, they co-designed an IoT solution that transformed the passenger experience at one of the region’s most visible infrastructure assets — real-time train location data that helped travelers navigate the terminal more efficiently. That collaboration began in a Cintrifuse meet-up. It ended with a replicable model for how established institutions and startups could build together.
We also launched Union Hall — a 35,000-square-foot co-working space in urban Cincinnati — to give the ecosystem a physical home and reinforce that innovation wasn’t happening somewhere else. It was happening here.
A less visible but equally important part of the work was preparing founders for the moments that mattered. Most of the startups we worked with were digital, transformation-focused companies. They were the kind of solutions BigCos needed but didn’t always know how to evaluate. Before a founder walked into a room with a major corporation or a venture investor, we worked with them: sharpening their pitch, building their fluency in the language of their potential customers, and ensuring that when the opportunity came, they were ready. The match was only as good as the preparation behind it.
Where we struggled most was talent. Specifically, helping founders build out their teams on the engineering and B2B sales side. Cincinnati had strong marketing talent, but the technical and sales pipeline timeline for early-stage startups was thin. Universities were leaning in, but the pull toward established corporations was strong — students whose parents had built careers at P&G, GE Aviation, or Kroger weren’t naturally drawn to the risk of joining a startup. That’s not a criticism. It’s a mindset shaped by generations of economic experience. And it meant the talent challenge wasn’t primarily a program problem. It was a cultural problem.
What unexpectedly cracked it was a high school education. A nonprofit focused on entrepreneurship education at the high school level turned out to be one of the most generative partnerships we found. High schoolers hadn’t yet internalized the same pressure toward corporate careers. They were curious, open, and genuinely excited about building things. Getting to them early, before their career paths were set, turned out to make a major difference.
