The co-founder of the Russian technology company Yandex, Arkady Volozh, is starting a new artificial intelligence (AI) company in Europe, primarily consisting of former Yandex employees. This comes after the parent company recently completed its exit from Russia.
Volozh, one of the few prominent Russian businessmen who condemned Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, will lead Nebius Group. Nebius is an AI infrastructure company and was previously the Nasdaq-listed parent company of Yandex, based in the Netherlands.
This step marks Volozh's efforts to save some of Yandex's former international activities after the war in Ukraine shook the company and forced thousands of its employees to flee Russia.
It was obvious that we not only cannot build anything from Russian technology, but also that the Russian technology business itself will continue on without us," said Volozh in an interview with the Financial Times. "When all this happened, half of Yandex's top management and 10 percent of the developers were outside Russia.
Volozh leads 1,300 employees, mainly former Yandex employees, to build Nebius. The core business of Nebius is the development of a cloud computing platform specifically designed to support the training and operation of large-scale AI models by start-ups.
Nebius is already collaborating with Europe's most well-known AI startups in France and Germany, says Volozh. 500 of its engineers are focusing on the development of specialized cloud infrastructure.
We have engineers who have built large technological constructions at Yandex," he said. "We know how to work very efficiently, how to integrate with supercomputers, and how to build really large clusters.
The sale of Yandex's core assets in Russia for 5.4 billion US dollars, the largest Western corporate exit during the conflict, took place after two years of negotiations that required the personal approval of President Vladimir Putin.
The war in Ukraine destroyed Volozh's ambitions to make Yandex a global internet giant, caused key technology partners to distance themselves from the company, and resulted in Nasdaq suspending trading of its shares.
The core activities of Yandex in Russia, which accounted for 95 percent of the group's revenue, assets, and employees, now belong to a consortium that includes members of the management and several Kremlin-approved investors.
Volozh, who moved to Israel in 2014 and holds Israeli citizenship, hopes that the new company will enable Nebius to utilize the engineering talent of former Yandex employees without the severe restrictions faced by any Russian company doing business in the West.
Nebius has $2.5 billion in cash from the sale of the Russian Yandex business and no debt, allowing the company to invest in the business and return a significant portion to shareholders.
Nebius will continue to report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, plans to introduce a new board, and hopes to resume trading on the Nasdaq 'soon' to attract additional capital.
We have the opportunity to build something bigger than what existed before," said Volozh. "The scale of what we are building assumes that there will be billions in investments through debt and equity in the future. What we have now gives us a scale that does not exist in Europe outside of the major tech sector.
