Cyber Defense Magazine: What Is The Ohioness To It?
Cyber Defense Magazine
By Arya Baviskar
Notes from the OhioX Tech Summit, 2026
“What is the Ohioness to it?”
Chris Berry, president and CEO of OhioX, asked the question almost in passing during his opening remarks, and then moved on. I spent the rest of the day, and the next few weeks, chasing an answer.
The fifth annual Ohio Tech Summit drew a sold-out crowd of 827 founders, investors, and policymakers to the Ohio Union at The Ohio State University, with a waitlist of more than a hundred who never got in the door. What began in 2022 as a 242-person gathering in Cleveland has now sold out five years running.
Tonjia Coverdale set the tone as emcee, leading a full-room O-H-I-O chant that I have come to understand is less a sports ritual here than a reflex. Then came the keynotes, and a theme the organizers had named in advance and that the speakers kept proving: Ohio’s bet is on applied AI — software pressed directly into physical things like factories, infrastructure, and logistics, rather than software for its own sake.
Mark Kvamme made the case first. A Silicon Valley native who left California to help build a venture scene in Columbus, where he co-founded Drive Capital in 2013, Kvamme argued that most companies fail at AI for a plain reason: they try to boil the ocean. His advice was to start narrow, ship something, and learn incrementally. The grand pilot that tries to do everything tends to do nothing.
Then Beth Flippo, founder and CEO of Dexa, the Dayton drone-delivery company, came up as a panelist and later closed the startup showcase with a demo video. Dexa is one of only a handful of U.S. companies that both build and fly FAA Part 135-certified delivery drones. Complex systems like autonomous aircraft leave no room for error and can’t simply be outsourced, she said, and Ohio is simply good at building them. The instinct to make things with your hands runs deep in a state that has taught innovation from a young age; even kindergartners have learned about the Wright Brothers for a century. The coasts chase wherever the money is pointing this quarter; Ohio keeps faith with what it already knows how to do, in the place “where flight first changed the world.”