Yandex

Arkady VolozhArkady VolozhArkady Volozh (born 1964) is a technology entrepreneur born in Soviet Kazakhstan and the principal founder of Yandex, which he led as CEO from 2000 to 2022, taking the Russian-language search company to a Nasdaq listing and building it into Russia’s largest internet company. In June 2022 he was sanctioned by the EU and stepped down from Yandex; in 2023 he publicly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in March 2024 the EU removed him from its sanctions list, and that year he became CEO of Nebius Group, formed from Yandex’s businesses outside Russia.Open the full entry began working on search technology in 1989 and in 1990 founded Arkadia (“Arcadia. Intelligent Projects”), a company developing search software, where Ilya SegalovichIlya SegalovichIlya Segalovich (1964–2013) was a Russian software engineer and co-founder of Yandex, serving as its chief technology officer and an executive director from 2000. Together with his childhood classmate Arkady Volozh he developed Russian-language full-text search technology and named the search engine Yandex; he led the company’s early search technology and was long involved in children’s charity work.Open the full entry led the software team. The company developed programs for searching the Bible, the Classifier of Goods and Services and the International Classifier of Patents, and the patent search program achieved some sales success.⁠[1][1][2]

In 1993, while Segalovich and Volozh were developing a search engine at Arkadia, they gave it a name: Segalovich wrote down the words that best described the program’s essence, the two kept coming back to “search” and “index,” and they settled on Yandex, short for “yet another indexer”; Volozh proposed replacing the first two letters with the Russian letter Я (pronounced ya, meaning “I”). Around the same time Arkadia became part of CompTek, a computer and software supplier, which a few years later founded the company Yandex.⁠[2][2][2][2]

On September 23, 1997, a search engine called “Яndex-Web” was unveiled. To show how it handled large volumes of information, the team indexed the entire Russian internet, then about 5,000 websites with roughly 4 GB of text; the search was based on Russian morphology, took the distance between words into account and ranked documents.⁠[2][2]

In 1998 the first contextual banner ad appeared on Yandex.ru: “Ваша киска купила бы Cisco” (“Your kitty would buy Cisco”); contextual advertising, showing ads based on what users search for, later became the company’s main business model.⁠[2][2]

In 2000 the company “Yandex” was formally registered, with CompTek’s shareholders as its founding shareholders; the ru-Net Holdings fund invested more than $5 million for a stake of almost 36%, and the remaining shareholders included the search engine’s managers and lead developers. Volozh left his post as CEO of CompTek International to become CEO of Yandex; Segalovich left CompTek to join Yandex as chief technology officer and a director. The Russian operating company Yandex LLC was registered in October 2000.⁠[2][1][1][1]

The seed investment came from Baring Vostok, a private equity firm founded by the American businessman Michael Calvey; at the time Yandex had only $72,000 in annual revenue and was losing $2 million a year. That year Yandex launched a batch of services at once, including a catalog, news, mail, website hosting, bookmarks and products (later Yandex Market).⁠[3][3][2]

In 2001 Yandex launched Yandex.Direct, the Russian internet’s first contextual ad placement system, which let advertisers place ads directly on Yandex without intermediaries and attracted more than 2,500 advertisers in its first year. In August 2002, driven by the growth of contextual advertising, Yandex became self-sufficient a year ahead of plan; that year it also launched Yandex.Images and Yandex.Market and, together with the PayCash group, the payment system Yandex.Money.⁠[2][2][2][2]

In 2003 Yandex paid its first dividend to shareholders, $100,000, and Yandex.Direct switched to auction-based, pay-per-click pricing.⁠[2][2]

In 2003, about half a year before Google went public, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page visited Volozh and Segalovich in Moscow and offered to buy Yandex for $100 million. Early investor Leonid Boguslavsky recalled that management considered the offer seriously, but Segalovich said “Let’s fight”; the two founders decided to keep control of the company.⁠[3][3][4][4]

Yandex N.V. was incorporated in the Netherlands in June 2004 and became the group’s holding parent after a 2007 reorganization; the previous parent was Yandex Technologies Limited. In 2004 Yandex.Maps went live, with a map of Europe and detailed maps of three cities: Moscow, St Petersburg and Kyiv.⁠[1][1][2]

In 2005 Yandex opened a representative office in Odesa, Ukraine, and launched yandex.ua, its first step outside Russia; the same year the Yandex Advertising Network started operating, splitting ad revenue fifty-fifty with partner sites. In 2007 Yandex opened its School of Data Analysis in Moscow, offering free two-year courses to train data analysts.⁠[2][2][2]

During Russia’s five-day war with Georgia in August 2008, Yandex News carried Russian-language reports from both sides. According to The Red Web by journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, the following month two Kremlin officials visited Yandex’s headquarters, among them Vladislav Surkov, deputy chief of the presidential administration; when Lev Gershenzon, then head of Yandex News, showed them the headlines selected by the algorithm, Surkov pointed to a liberal outlet and said, “This is our enemy.” The company thereafter promised to keep a line of communication open to the Kremlin, while Gershenzon kept stressing that the headlines were chosen by an algorithm, not by people.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

That year Yandex also fended off a potential takeover by Alisher Usmanov, a Kremlin-linked oligarch who had lobbied then-President Dmitry Medvedev for support on national security grounds. Yandex also prepared for a stock listing in 2008 but dropped the plan amid the global financial crisis. On August 25 Yandex changed its logo from “Яndex” to the all-Cyrillic “Яндекс.”⁠[4][5][2]

In 2009 Yandex developed and adopted MatrixNet, a new machine-learning method that could take far more search factors and their combinations into account and significantly improved search quality; that year it also launched local services in Kazakhstan and opened Yandex Labs in Palo Alto, United States. By 2009 Yandex held 56% of the Russian-language search market, more than twice Google’s share.⁠[2][2][3][3]

On September 7, 2009, Yandex N.V. issued one priority share (popularly called a “golden share”) at its nominal value of €1 to the state-owned Sberbank, about 60% of whose voting shares were held by the Central Bank of Russia. The holder had the right to approve anyone’s accumulation of 25% or more of Yandex’s shares (if the board approved such an accumulation) and to approve board decisions such as transferring core assets. According to the prospectus, the board’s criteria for choosing the holder were that it be controlled by the Russian government, be a public company, and have no conflicting interests in the internet or media sectors.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

The arrangement was made to satisfy government interests, and for about a decade it eased the Russian authorities’ concern that Yandex might fall into foreign hands.⁠[4][4][4]

On April 28, 2011, Yandex N.V. filed an F-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Its risk factors warned that high-profile Russian businesses such as Yandex “can be particularly vulnerable to politically motivated actions,” and noted that well-connected financial groups and “oligarchs” had from time to time sought control of attractive Russian businesses.⁠[1][1][1]

That same year, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) required Yandex to disclose information about people who had donated to opposition figure Alexei Navalny through Yandex’s payment service.⁠[3]

On May 24, 2011, Yandex went public on Nasdaq under the ticker YNDX, offering 52.2 million shares with a price range of $24 to $25 per share and raising $1.3 billion, 19% more than expected. It closed its first trading day at $38.84, up 55% from its opening price. It was the largest internet IPO since Google’s in 2004.⁠[2][5][5][5][3]

On September 20 that year Yandex launched the Turkish portal yandex.com.tr, its first market outside the former Soviet Union; Yandex Taxi was also launched in 2011 as a mobile app.⁠[2][2]

Co-founder and chief technology officer Ilya Segalovich died of illness on July 27, 2013.⁠[6]

From 2014 Yandex shares were also listed on the Moscow Exchange. That year, after Russia annexed Crimea, Putin called the internet a “CIA project” at a press conference, singled out Yandex as “developed with Western influence,” and suggested that its registration in the Netherlands was “not only for tax reasons.”⁠[7][3]

In 2017 Yandex released the voice assistant Alice and open-sourced CatBoost, a gradient-boosting machine-learning library. That year Yandex.Taxi and Uber agreed to combine their businesses in Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia and Kazakhstan, with Uber investing $225 million and Yandex $100 million, for a post-money valuation of $3.725 billion.⁠[2][2][2][2]

To mark the company’s 20th anniversary, Putin visited Yandex’s Moscow headquarters on September 21, 2017, at Volozh’s invitation.⁠[3][8]

On May 15, 2017, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree, as part of sanctions against Russia, ordering the blocking of VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, RBC, and Yandex along with dozens of its services such as Yandex.Music and Yandex.Money. In March of that year 48% of Ukrainian internet users used Yandex daily. Human Rights Watch called for the ban to be revoked.⁠[9][9][9][9]

In 2018 Yandex began public testing of a driverless ride-hailing service in Innopolis and Skolkovo and obtained licenses to test autonomous vehicles in Israel and the U.S. state of Nevada; that year it also launched its first hardware product, the Alice-powered smart speaker Yandex Station, as well as the car-sharing service Yandex.Drive and the food delivery service Yandex.Eats.⁠[2][2][2][2]

In October 2018, rumors that Sberbank was in talks to buy up to 30% of Yandex to protect it from “potential trouble” sent Yandex shares down 9.4% after the New York open, erasing more than $1 billion in market value; after an emergency meeting Volozh decided not to pursue the deal, and the company then began talks with the presidential administration on a new governance structure.⁠[4][4]

In June 2019 Russian lawmaker Anton Gorelkin introduced a bill to cap foreign investors’ holdings in companies deemed “significant information resources” at 20%, at a time when 85% of Yandex’s shares traded on U.S. markets; after the Kremlin backed the bill, Yandex lost $1.5 billion in market value in a single day.⁠[4][4][4]

On November 18, 2019, Yandex’s board proposed a governance overhaul: creating a Public Interest Foundation with no economic rights but limited governance rights, transferring Sberbank’s priority share to it and amending its terms. The foundation could block any single party or group acting in concert from accumulating 10% or more of the economic or voting interests (down from 25%), could nominate two members of the 12-person board, and, through a new Public Interest Committee, would oversee matters such as sales of material intellectual property, transfers of Russian users’ personal data to non-Russians, changes to user-data protection policies, and agreements with foreign states or international organizations. The foundation’s board had 11 seats, filled by representatives of five Russian universities, three non-governmental institutions and three Yandex managers (Volozh, Tigran Khudaverdyan and Elena Bunina).⁠[10][10][10][10][10][10]

Chairman John Boynton said Yandex had to adapt to Russia’s evolving legal and regulatory environment and that the plan balanced the concerns of public authorities in its core market with the interests of shareholders, employees and users. The plan followed 13 months of negotiations, and Gorelkin then said he would rework his bill. On December 20, 2019, shareholders approved all proposals with about 99% of votes in favor.⁠[10][10][4][4][11]

In late April 2020 internet users noticed that Yandex searches for opposition figure Navalny returned mostly negative content; Yandex apologized and said it had been an “experiment” shown only to a small number of users. In February that year, a police officer accused of planting drugs on an investigative journalist said he had obtained the journalist’s address from Yandex Taxi; Yandex replied that it always complies with security services’ requests to “help save lives.”⁠[4][4][4]

Yandex built three supercomputers for machine learning: Lyapunov entered service in December 2020, and Chervonenkis and Galushkin in June 2021. All three were based on AMD EPYC processors and Nvidia A100 accelerators, with 1,592, 1,088 and 1,096 A100s respectively (3,776 in total); Chervonenkis and Lyapunov were located at the Sasovo data center and Galushkin at the Vladimir data center.⁠[12][12][13][13][13][12]

In the November 2021 global TOP500 supercomputer list, Chervonenkis ranked 19th at 21.53 petaflops, with Galushkin and Lyapunov 36th and 40th. The supercomputers were used to train neural networks with billions of parameters, including the YaLM language models, which were used to generate and rank instant search results and to support Alice’s conversational abilities. That year Yandex also bought Akropol Bank, obtained a banking license and opened Yandex Bank.⁠[12][12][12][12][12][2]

On February 24, 2022, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yandex’s share price had more than halved by noon; Nasdaq halted trading in Yandex shares from February 28. Within six days of the start of the war, Yandex’s market capitalization fell from its November 2021 peak of $30 billion to below $7 billion. Uber’s three executives on the Yandex Taxi board resigned immediately, and directors Esther Dyson and Ilya Strebulaev also resigned from the Yandex board, saying that in the current political environment it had become impossible to provide a free and open information platform for the Russian public without breaking the law and endangering employees.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3]

On March 1, former Yandex news chief Lev Gershenzon wrote publicly that “Yandex today is a key element in hiding information about war,” saying at least 30 million Russian users of the Yandex homepage news saw no casualties of the war. In the first weeks of the war about 70% of the information on Yandex News came from state-controlled media pushing propaganda, the result of a decade-long crackdown on Russia’s independent media and new post-invasion laws on permissible media sources.⁠[3][3][14]

On March 15, 2022, the EU imposed personal sanctions on Tigran Khudaverdyan, Yandex’s executive director and deputy CEO, who stepped down that day. The EU sanctions targeted him as an individual; neither Yandex N.V. nor any of its subsidiaries had been sanctioned by the United States, the EU or the United Kingdom.⁠[7][7][3]

On April 28, 2022, Yandex confirmed it had signed a term sheet with VK to sell its news aggregator News and its content platform Zen. That month the jailed Navalny posted a series of attacks calling Yandex’s homepage news “a solid shameless lie” and the war’s main propaganda channel; Yandex’s position was that its news aggregation had to follow Russian media law and that the news sources it could draw on were limited by a state licensing regime.⁠[15][15][15]

On June 3, 2022, the Council of the European Union adopted Implementing Regulation 2022/878, adding Yandex co-founder and CEO Arkady Volozh to the sanctions list under Regulation 269/2014. The listing stated that Russian state-owned banks were shareholders and investors in Yandex, that the 2019 restructuring gave a “golden share” to a Public Interest Foundation built to “defend the Russian Federation interests,” giving the Russian government a veto over a list of issues, and that Yandex promoted state media and narratives in its search results and deranked and removed content critical of the Kremlin.⁠[16][16][16][16][16]

Volozh resigned that day as executive director and CEO of Yandex N.V. and said that while sanctions were in place he would give no voting instructions for the shares held by his family trust (45.3% of voting power and 8.6% of economic interest), which the trustee would vote in line with the independent board’s recommendations. Yandex’s board later called the sanctions against Volozh “wholly unjust,” based on an inaccurate understanding of Volozh and Yandex.⁠[17][17][17][18]

On September 12, 2022, Yandex announced that its Russian subsidiary had completed the sale of the news aggregation platform and Zen to VK and the acquisition of 100% of the food delivery platform Delivery Club, with approval from Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service. VK took over the yandex.ru address, and Yandex moved its homepage to ya.ru.⁠[19][2]

That year Yandex open-sourced YaLM 100B, then the largest publicly available GPT-like model. The model has 100 billion parameters and was trained for 65 days on a cluster of 800 A100 graphics cards using 1.7 TB of English and Russian text.⁠[2][20]

On November 25, 2022, the board of Yandex N.V. announced a strategic process to review restructuring the group’s ownership and governance in the current geopolitical environment: developing the international self-driving, cloud computing, data labeling and ed-tech businesses independently from Russia while divesting ownership and control of all other businesses; Yandex N.V. would in due course be renamed, with the divested businesses keeping exclusive rights to the Yandex brand.⁠[21][21][21]

In 2023 Yandex launched YandexGPT, a generative neural network trained on its own supercomputers, and Shedevrum, an image and video generation app based on the YandexART model.⁠[2][2]

On February 5, 2024, Yandex N.V. announced a definitive agreement with a purchaser consortium to sell all of the group’s businesses in Russia and certain international markets for total consideration of RUB 475 billion, payable in cash and Yandex N.V. Class A shares, with at least half in cash and the cash portion paid in offshore Chinese yuan outside Russia. In line with the Russian government’s approval conditions for sales of Russian assets by parent companies from “unfriendly” countries, the price reflected a discount of at least 50% to “fair value”; the businesses being sold accounted for more than 95% of the group’s consolidated revenue in the first nine months of 2023 and about 95% of its assets and employees.⁠[22][22][22][22]

The purchaser was “Consortium.First,” a newly formed closed-end investment fund led by FMP, a company of senior managers of the Russian businesses, together with the Argonaut fund wholly owned by Lukoil and companies wholly owned respectively by Alexander Chachava, Pavel Prass and Alexander Ryazanov; none of the members were under U.S., EU, UK or Swiss sanctions, and none would hold a controlling stake. The Bell cited two sources who believed some of the publicly named buyers were intermediaries for others behind the scenes. After the deal Yandex N.V. would keep four international businesses, Nebius AI, Toloka AI, Avride and TripleTen, and its Finnish data center, with about 1,300 employees.⁠[22][22][22][22][23][22][22]

On May 17, 2024, the sale reached its first closing, with Yandex N.V. selling about 68% of the target company; it had earlier sold 3.7% for cash to a subsidiary of the target for equity incentives, leaving about 28%. An amendment to the articles of association that took effect at the same time eliminated the “priority share” held by the Public Interest Foundation and its right to appoint two directors, and four Russian directors resigned.⁠[24][24]

On July 15, 2024, the second and final closing was completed, with Yandex N.V. selling its remaining stake of about 28% at a deal valuation of about $5.4 billion; in total the transaction brought in $2.8 billion in cash and 162.5 million Class A shares. The company’s shares had been delisted from the Moscow Exchange on July 10. Chairman John Boynton said that “all connections with Russia have now been severed.”⁠[25][25][25][25]

On July 16 the retained businesses were launched as Nebius Group, headquartered in Amsterdam and led by Volozh, positioned as a European AI infrastructure company; the August 15 shareholder meeting approved the change, and Yandex N.V.’s legal name became Nebius Group N.V. The Yandex brand continued to be used by the Russian businesses that were sold.⁠[26][26][26][27][24]

In the second week of October 2026, Yandex data centers were hit by Ukrainian drones three times in one week: the Sasovo data center, which houses two of the three supercomputers used to develop the company’s AI model, was shut down, and the next day the Kaluga region data center was partly put out of action. On October 11 Yandex said in a service alert on Telegram that operations at its data center in the city of Vladimir had been completely suspended after an attack, that the platform was running in emergency mode, that the remaining resource configuration was “unstable,” and advised users to activate disaster-recovery plans; no one was injured. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was responding “in mirror-like fashion” to Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centers.⁠[28][28][28][28][28][28]

The attacks damaged three of Yandex’s six data centers, disrupting search, navigation, food delivery and banking services as well as corporate Yandex Cloud clients. On October 14 Russian Digital Development Minister Shadayev said his ministry had helped Yandex with additional sites to relocate key systems; Yandex said it had for many years been building distributed infrastructure and backup capacity at independent sites. As of that evening, services such as Pay and Cloud had not been fully restored.⁠[29][29][29][29]

Yandex: Official website: https://yandex.com/company/ (opens in a new window).⁠[30]

X: Public account: https://x.com/yandexcom (opens in a new window)⁠[30]