{"history":[{"id":"cad60609-aa41-46af-bf41-b99e65d066f9","wordChanged":"Тындекс","newWord":":::summary\n![Yandex LLC](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Yandex///main///office.jpg)\n**Name:** Yandex LLC \n**Native Name:** Яндекс \n**Logo Caption:** Logo used since 2021 \n**Image Caption:** Headquarters in Moscow \n**Type:** [Privately held company](https://bliptext.com/articles/privately-held-company) \n**Foundation:** 23 (Yandex search launched by CompTek) · 2007 (reincorporation of holding company in the Netherlands) \n**Location:** [Moscow](https://bliptext.com/articles/moscow), [Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/russia) \n**Founder:** Arkady Volozh · Arkady Borkovsky · Ilya Segalovich \n**Area Served:** Worldwide \n**Key People:** Artyom Savinovsky (CEO) \n**Num Employees:** 25 431 (2022) \n**Industry:** Internet · Search engine · Web mapping · Streaming media · Online shopping · Online food ordering \n**Products:** [List of Yandex products and services](https://bliptext.com/articles/list-of-yandex-products-and-services) \n**Homepage:** https://ya.ru \n**Owner:** Alexander Chachava (25%)
Pavel Prass (15%)
Lukoil (15%)
Alexander Ryazanov (10%)
Senior management (35%)
(It is speculated that the publicly identified owners are intermediaries for others) \n:::\n\n# \nYandeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeex (Тындекс) is a Russian [technology company](https://bliptext.com/articles/technology-company) that provides [Internet](https://bliptext.com/articles/internet)-related products and services including a [web browser](https://bliptext.com/articles/web-browser), [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine), [cloud computing](https://bliptext.com/articles/cloud-computing), [web mapping](https://bliptext.com/articles/web-mapping), [online food ordering](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-food-ordering), [streaming media](https://bliptext.com/articles/streaming-media), [online shopping](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-shopping), and a [ridesharing company](https://bliptext.com/articles/ridesharing-company).\n[Yandex Search](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-search) is the largest [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine) in Russia with an estimated 72% [market share](https://bliptext.com/articles/market-share) in Russia and a 2.8% [market share](https://bliptext.com/articles/market-share) worldwide.\n[Yandex Taxi](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-taxi) is the largest [ridesharing company](https://bliptext.com/articles/ridesharing-company) in Russia.\nYandex was founded by [Arkady Volozh](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-volozh) and launched its first product, a [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine), in 1997.\nDue to its significant media activities in Russia, the company has long faced pressure for control by the [government of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/government-of-russia).\nIn July 2024, in a transaction brought about by [international sanctions during the Russian invasion of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/international-sanctions-during-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine) and restrictions on foreign ownership, [Nebius Group](https://bliptext.com/articles/nebius-group), the Dutch holding company that owned Yandex, sold its Russian assets to a group of Russian investors for a discounted price of US$5.3 billion.\n\n# History\n[Arkady Volozh](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-volozh) and [Ilya Segalovich](https://bliptext.com/articles/ilya-segalovich) were friends from their school days in Kazakhstan in the 1980s.\nVolozh started developing algorithms to search in Russian texts and contacted Segalovich in 1990.\nThey worked together to develop search software, with the company name Arcadia.\nIn 1993, they invented the name \"[Yandex](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex)\" as an easy way to remember \"Yet Another iNDEXer\".\nThis is also a [bilingual pun](https://bliptext.com/articles/bilingual-pun) on \"index\" since \"Я\" (\"ya\") means \"I\" in Russian.\nOn September 23, 1997, the Yandex.ru search engine was launched and presented at the Softool exhibition in Moscow.\nArcadia became part of the software and computer part supply company, CompTek, and with Volozh as the CEO in 2000.\nIn 1998, Yandex launched [contextual advertisement](https://bliptext.com/articles/contextual-advertisement) on its search engine.\nIn 2000, Yandex was incorporated in Cyprus as a standalone company by Arkady Volozh.\nIn September 2005, it opened an office in Ukraine and launched www.yandex.ua.\nIn 2007, Yandex introduced a customized search engine for Ukrainian users; Yandex also opened its development center in Kyiv in May 2007.\nIn 2008, Yandex extended its presence in Ukraine by increasing bandwidth between Moscow data centers and UA-IX in Ukraine fivefold.\nIn 2009, all services of www.yandex.ua were localized for the Ukrainian market.\nIn 2010, Yandex launched its \"Poltava\" search engine algorithm for Ukrainian users, based on its [MatrixNet](https://bliptext.com/articles/matrixnet) technology.\nOn June 20, 2008, it announced the formation of Yandex Labs in [Silicon Valley](https://bliptext.com/articles/silicon-valley), to foster \"innovation in search and advertising technology\".\nOn 10 October 2017, Yandex introduced its voice assistant Alice.\nIn February 2018, the deal to merge Yandex.Taxi and Uber in Russia and five neighbouring countries closed.\nYandex's share in the new company, worth more than $3.8bn, was 59.3%.\nOn 9 October 2019, the company unveiled the second smart speaker of its own design - \"Yandex. Station Mini.\"\nIn 2020 Yandex published its internal operating principles.\nThere are more than 35 principles.\nThese include: \"We do not develop technology for military purposes\", \"We comply with the laws of each country that we operate in and try to constructively contribute to any proposed legislation that concerns technology or the market\", and \"The products and services that we make don't have any persuasion or political overtones.\"\nFor example, Yandex advertising services do not accept political ads.\nIn September 2020, Yandex spun off the direction of unmanned cars into a separate company, Yandex Self Driving Group.\nOn 10 March 2021, the company launched its own payment service Yandex Pay.\nIn the first half of September 2021, the IT company's servers were subjected to the largest DDoS attack in the history of the Runet.\nIn March 2022, executive director and deputy CEO Tigran Khudaverdyan resigned after EU sanctions.\nIn April, CEO [Elena Bunina](https://bliptext.com/articles/elena-bunina) resigned and moved to [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel).\nIn June, Volozh resigned.\nOn August 23, 2022, it was announced that Yandex is buying Delivery Club from [VK](https://bliptext.com/articles/vk-company) in exchange for [Yandex.Zen](https://bliptext.com/articles/zen-recommendation-system) and [Yandex.News](https://bliptext.com/articles/zen-news).\nIn September 2022, assets of Yandex and businessmen [Boris](https://bliptext.com/articles/boris-rotenberg-businessman) and [Arkady Rotenberg](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-rotenberg), who are close to President [Vladimir Putin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vladimir-putin), were [seized](https://bliptext.com/articles/seized) in [Finland](https://bliptext.com/articles/finland).\nIn December 2022 it became known that \"Yandex\" registered the company Beyond ML in Armenia.\nOn December 30, Arkady Volozh announced his departure from Yandex by publishing a letter to employees on the company's internal portal.\nOn May 17, 2023, Yandex launched its YaGPT neural network, analogous to the [ChatGPT](https://bliptext.com/articles/chatgpt) neural network.\nIn October 2023, Yandex Group's parent company, Yandex N.V. (Netherlands), received approval for internal restructuring from the government commission for controlling foreign investment in Russia.\nIn July 2024, Volozh announced his return to the parts of the business retained by Yandex N.V. (Netherlands) to be named [Nebius Group](https://bliptext.com/articles/nebius-group).\n(The EU lifted sanctions on Volozh in March 2024.) Volozh will be CEO of Nebius, according to Reuters.\n\n## Acquisitions\nIn March 2007, it acquired Russian [social networking service](https://bliptext.com/articles/social-networking-service) moikrug.ru.; on June 16, 2008, Yandex acquired SMILink, a Russian road traffic monitoring agency, to merge with Yandex.Maps services.\nIn September 2008, the company acquired the rights to the Punto Switcher software program, an automatic Russian to English keyboard layout switcher.\nIn September 2010, it invested in a $4.3 million financing round by [Face.com](https://bliptext.com/articles/face-com).\nThe company was acquired by [Facebook](https://bliptext.com/articles/facebook) in 2012.\nIn December 2010, the firm launched Yandex.Start to find startups and work with them systematically, and purchased WebVisor's behavior analysis technology in December 2010.\nIn September 2011, it invested in [Blekko](https://bliptext.com/articles/blekko) as part of a $30 million financing round.\nIn November 2011, it acquired software developer [SPB Software](https://bliptext.com/articles/spb-software) for $38 million.\nIn June 2012, it acquired a 25% stake in Seismotech, for $1 million.\nOn January 26, 2011, it introduced premium placement opportunity in its Business directory in which advertisers' local small businesses are highlighted.\nOn January 27, 2011, the company acquired single sign-in service Loginza.\nIn August 2011, Yandex acquired The Tweeted Times, a news delivery startup.\nIn September 2011, it launched a search engine and a range of other services in Turkey, opening an office in Istanbul.\nIn October 2013, the company acquired [KinoPoisk](https://bliptext.com/articles/kinopoisk), the biggest Russian movie search engine.\nIn February 2014, Yandex invested several million dollars in MultiShip.\nIn March 2014, it acquired [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel)i [geolocation](https://bliptext.com/articles/geolocation) startup [KitLocate](https://bliptext.com/articles/kitlocate) and opened a [research and development](https://bliptext.com/articles/research-and-development) (R&D) office in [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel).\nIn June 2014, it acquired Auto.ru, an [online marketplace](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-marketplace) and [classified advertising](https://bliptext.com/articles/classified-advertising) website for automobiles, for $175 million.\nIn December 2015, it acquired [Internet security](https://bliptext.com/articles/internet-security) company Agnitum.\nOn June 6, 2017, the company invested in a $5 million financing round by [Doc+](https://bliptext.com/articles/doc).\nIn December 2017, it acquired [food delivery](https://bliptext.com/articles/food-delivery) Foodfox.\nOn February 7, 2018, [Uber](https://bliptext.com/articles/uber) and Yandex NV merged their businesses in Russia, [Kazakhstan](https://bliptext.com/articles/kazakhstan), [Azerbaijan](https://bliptext.com/articles/azerbaijan), [Armenia](https://bliptext.com/articles/armenia), [Belarus](https://bliptext.com/articles/belarus) and [Georgia](https://bliptext.com/articles/georgia-country).\nUber invested $225 million and owns 36.6% stake in the venture while Yandex invested $100 million and owns a 59.3% stake.\nIn May 2018, [Sberbank](https://bliptext.com/articles/sberbank) and Yandex completed a joint venture deal to develop a B2C eCommerce ecosystem.\nIn October 2018, Yandex acquired Edadil (Russian: Едадил, lit. \"grocery deals\"), a deal aggregator service.\nIn June 2021, Yandex, [VTB Bank](https://bliptext.com/articles/vtb-bank), LANIT Group and computer hardware producer Gigabyte founded a joint venture to start producing servers in Russia in 2022.\nIn October 2021, construction of a new plant in [Ryazan Oblast](https://bliptext.com/articles/ryazan-oblast) was launched with 1 billion roubles during the first stage of investments.\nThe new plant will produce servers, data storage systems, gateways and smart equipment under \"Openyard\" brand.\nHowever, in June 2023 Yandex announced it was looking for ways to exit the joint venture.\nIn January 2022, Yandex acquired \"eLama\", digital advertising platform, waiting for the approval from [Federal Antimonopoly Service](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-antimonopoly-service).\nThat same month Yandex has also bought \"BandLink\" music service.\n\n## Finances\nThe company became profitable in November 2002.\nIn 2004, Yandex sales increased to $17 million, up 1000% in 2 years.\nThe net income of the company in 2004 was $7 million.\nIn June 2006, the weekly revenue of [Yandex.Direct](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-direct) context ads system exceeded $1 million.\nThe company's accounting has been audited by [Deloitte](https://bliptext.com/articles/deloitte) since 1999.\nBetween 2004 and 2006, Tiger Technologies obtained an 11% ownership stake.\nOn May 24, 2011, it raised $1.3 billion in an [initial public offering](https://bliptext.com/articles/initial-public-offering) on [NASDAQ](https://bliptext.com/articles/nasdaq), the biggest [initial public offering](https://bliptext.com/articles/initial-public-offering) for a [dot-com company](https://bliptext.com/articles/dot-com-company) since [Google](https://bliptext.com/articles/google)'s offering in 2004.\nAmong the largest investors were [Baring Vostok Capital Partners](https://bliptext.com/articles/baring-vostok-capital-partners), which owned a 30% stake, and Tiger Technologies, which owned a 15% stake.\nIn 2013, Yandex became the largest media property in Russia by revenue.\nIn March 2022, Yandex warned shareholders about the risk of default if holders of Yandex N.V. wished to use their right to pay them off early.\nBefore that, the trading of Yandex securities on the NASDAQ was suspended due to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.\nIn September 2022, Yandex bought back 98.7% of issued Yandex N.V convertible bonds.\nIn April 2022, TechCrunch reported that Yandex signed an agreement with VK holding with regard to the sale of News and Zen media services together with the main page yandex.ru\nIn September 2022, News, Zen, and yandex.ru were transferred to a new owner.\nAt the same time ya.ru became Yandex's new main page as well as the key entry point for Search, Mail, and other non-media services.\nIn November 2022, the board of directors of Yandex N.V. announced a possible restructuring of the company.\nThe main part of the business would be placed into a separate group of companies that will keep the Yandex brand, which may be registered in Russia.\nThe international parts of some businesses will be placed into separate companies under the control of Dutch Yandex N.V., which will eventually leave the shareholders of the Russian Yandex Group.\nIn March 2023, the NASDAQ exchange announced its intention to delist Yandex and a number of other companies doing business in Russia.\nYandex appealed this decision.\nNASDAQ granted the appeal, given the company's plans to separate the Russian and foreign businesses.\nThe suspension of trading remains in effect.\nIn May 2023, Yandex announced that it received applications from potential investors for the purchase of an economic share in the company.\nEconomic investors will not be able to influence the company's activities.\nVoting control and management will remain with the top management of Yandex.\nAmong the main applicants were private industrial investors [Vagit Alekperov](https://bliptext.com/articles/vagit-alekperov) (Lukoil Founder) and [Vladimir Potanin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vladimir-potanin).\n\n# Offices\nIn 2008, Yandex opened a technology and business development unit called Yandex Labs in [Silicon Valley](https://bliptext.com/articles/silicon-valley).\nIn 2011, the [Istanbul](https://bliptext.com/articles/istanbul) office was launched together with the company's web portal in Turkey in 2011.\nIn 2012, the company opened its first European office in [Lucerne](https://bliptext.com/articles/lucerne) to serve advertising clients in the EU.\nIts first [research and development](https://bliptext.com/articles/research-and-development) office in Europe started operating in [Berlin](https://bliptext.com/articles/berlin) in 2014.\nIn 2015, the company's [Shanghai](https://bliptext.com/articles/shanghai) office was launched to facilitate work with Chinese companies operating on the Russian language market.\nAs of 2018 it had more than 30 offices worldwide.\nIn December 2021 a new location in Prague was added to accommodate the company's rapidly expanding crowdsourcing, routing, cloud computing, ridesharing and weather forecasting teams.\nAs of 2021, Yandex had offices in 12 countries.\n\n# Products and services\nIn 2001, the company launched the [Yandex.Direct](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-direct) [online advertising](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-advertising) network.\nIn January 2009, [Mozilla Firefox 3.5](https://bliptext.com/articles/mozilla-firefox-3-5) replaced Google with Yandex as the default search provider for Russian-language builds.\nIn August 2009, the company introduced a player of free legal music in its search results.\nIn September 2010, Yandex launched [Yandex Music](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-music), a music streaming service, with a catalogue of 800,000 tracks from 58,000 performers.\nOn 19 May 2010, it launched an English-only web search engine.\nIn March 2013, the company added an English [user interface](https://bliptext.com/articles/user-interface) to its translation [mobile app](https://bliptext.com/articles/mobile-app).\nIn July 2013, [Mail.Ru](https://bliptext.com/articles/vk-company) started placing Yandex Direct ads on its search result pages.\nOn 10 October 2017, the company introduced its [intelligent personal assistant](https://bliptext.com/articles/intelligent-personal-assistant), [Alisa](https://bliptext.com/articles/alisa-virtual-assistant) (Alice), for [Android](https://bliptext.com/articles/android-operating-system), [iOS](https://bliptext.com/articles/ios), and [Microsoft Windows](https://bliptext.com/articles/microsoft-windows).\nOn 28 April 2022, Yandex announced that it had sold its news and blogging products to VK.\nIn 2022, following the [Russian invasion of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/russian-invasion-of-ukraine), the [Bureau of Investigative Journalism](https://bliptext.com/articles/bureau-of-investigative-journalism) said that Yandex-delivered ads promoted misinformation about the war in Ukraine which were produced by more than half a dozen Russian-language news sites.\nMany of the articles displayed in Yandex's news aggregators were also from Russian state-owned and state-sponsored sources while the top search results about the war would sometimes prominently feature pro-war websites.\n\n## Search\n\n## Games\n**Yandex.Games** is an Internet gaming platform made by Yandex, which is available on both browser and mobile.\nAs of 2022, the number of games included in the catalog exceeded 10,000, with more than 11 million players a month.\nThe platform provides two types of income: advertising and in-app purchases.\nThere is also an in-game currency called \"Yans\".\nDevelopers add their games to the catalog independently and edit them in the future.\nAll games are [moderated](https://bliptext.com/articles/moderation).\nMandatory requirements include integration with the Yandex.Games SDK, support for [HTTPS](https://bliptext.com/articles/https) and offline Service Worker mode.\nGame developers follow the updates of the platform in the blog, and content is provided by companies all over the world (e.g. Dutch media platform Azerion ).\nIn addition to a wide system of user ratings and reviews, the service uses complex algorithms to create personalized collections: games that have already been played, or those that are likely to be played.\n\n## Technologies\nOn 16 February 2018, the company showed off the first tests of its [autonomous cars](https://bliptext.com/articles/autonomous-car) in Moscow.\nOn 5 December 2018, Yandex announced the release of their first smartphone, the Yandex.Phone.\nIn May 2023, Yandex implemented the YandexGPT generative neural network in the virtual assistant [Alice](https://bliptext.com/articles/alice-virtual-assistant).\nBetween 2021 and 2023, Yandex introduced automatic voice-over translation for any YouTube video in English, Chinese, French, Spanish and German.\nOn 7 June 2023, the company launched a test of its first self-driving taxi in Moscow.\n\n## Facial recognition on cameras\nThe Kremlin planned in 2024 to use NTechLab's software for a secret center that will collect and analyze CCTV footage from across Russia.\nThe aim of the project is to 'identify threats in a timely manner' and 'monitor individuals for destructive and/or disloyal behavior'.\n\n## Open source\nIn 2009, Yandex began development on its project [MatrixNet](https://bliptext.com/articles/matrixnet).\nIt was a unique patented algorithm for the building of machine learning models, which used one of the original gradient boosting schemes.\nIn July 2017, the [CatBoost](https://bliptext.com/articles/catboost) library was released to the public.\nIt implements the Matrixnet algorithm for the building of machine learning models.\nAt the time of release, the technology was already in use as part of a collaborative project with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to analyze the results of conducted particle experiments CatBoost is used by foreign companies.\nFor example: [JetBrains](https://bliptext.com/articles/jetbrains) uses it for code completion, [CloudFlare](https://bliptext.com/articles/cloudflare) for bot detection, and [Careem](https://bliptext.com/articles/careem) for trip-distance determination.\nIn 2012, Yandex began research and development within the field of natural-speech processing.\nAnd in October 2023, the company introduced Yandex SpeechKit.\nIt is a speech-recognition and synthesis technology as well as a public API for speech recognition that Android and iOS developers can use.\nIn 2022, the company published the source code for the [YDB](https://bliptext.com/articles/ydb-database) database management system.\nIt is used in its own voice assistant Alice as well as in Yandex.Go and [Yandex Market](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-market) services.\nIn 2023, Yandex published the source code for YTsaurus.\nIt is a platform for work with big data.\n\n## Investments\nYandex is an [investor](https://bliptext.com/articles/investor) in several foreign companies.\nExamples include: Vizi Labs, [Face.com](https://bliptext.com/articles/face-com), [Blekko](https://bliptext.com/articles/blekko), and SalesPredict.\n\n# Security\nOn June 1, 2017, Yandex closed its offices in [Kyiv](https://bliptext.com/articles/kyiv) and [Odesa](https://bliptext.com/articles/odesa), Ukraine after the [Security Service of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/security-service-of-ukraine) raided the offices and accused the company of illegally collecting Ukrainian users' data and sending it to Russian security agencies.\nThe firm denied any wrongdoing.\nIn May 2017, all Yandex services were banned in Ukraine by Presidential Decree No. 133/2017.\nIn October and November 2018, Yandex was targeted in a cyberattack using the [Regin](https://bliptext.com/articles/regin-malware) malware, aimed at stealing technical information from its research and development unit on how users were authenticated.\nAn investigation by [Kaspersky Lab](https://bliptext.com/articles/kaspersky-lab) attributed the hacks to [Five Eyes](https://bliptext.com/articles/five-eyes) intelligence agencies.\nIn June 2019, [RBC](https://bliptext.com/articles/rbc-group) News reported that Yandex had refused a request by the Russian [Federal Security Service](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-security-service) (FSB) under the [Yarovaya law](https://bliptext.com/articles/yarovaya-law) to surrender encryption keys that could decrypt the private data of its e-mail service and cloud storage users.\nThe company argued that it was impossible to comply with the relevant law without compromising its users' privacy.\n[Maxim Akimov](https://bliptext.com/articles/maxim-akimov), [Deputy Prime Minister of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/deputy-prime-minister-of-russia), said that the government would take action to relieve FSB pressure on the company.\n[Alexander Zharov](https://bliptext.com/articles/alexander-zharov), head of the [Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-service-for-supervision-of-communications-information-technology-and-mass-media), subsequently said that Yandex and the FSB had reached an agreement where the company would provide the required data without handing over the encryption keys.\nIn February 2021 Yandex admitted that one of their system administrators with access rights to Yandex's email service had enabled unauthorized access, leading to almost 5,000 Yandex email inboxes being compromised.\nOn January 25, 2023, a leaked archive with approx. 44 GB of Yandex services was shared on BreachForums via [BitTorrent](https://bliptext.com/articles/bittorrent).\nIn June 2023 Yandex was fined by the Moscow court for its repeated refusal to share user information with the Federal Security Service.\n\n# News and media\nIn April 2014, a [film](https://bliptext.com/articles/film) about the history of Yandex called Startup was released.\nOn 20 April 2020, as a result of the [COVID-19 pandemic in Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/covid-19-pandemic-in-russia), Yandex made its home coronavirus testing service free of charge for all residents of Moscow and its surroundings, extending it to other regions in the future.\nPreviously, it announced the launch of the service on 16 April.\nIn late March 2022, Yandex was the subject of a [Financial Times](https://bliptext.com/articles/financial-times) investigation that had been initiated by the [nonprofit organization](https://bliptext.com/articles/nonprofit-organization) Me2B Alliance as part of an application auditing campaign led by researcher Zach Edwards.\nEdwards and four expert researchers, including [Cher Scarlett](https://bliptext.com/articles/cher-scarlett), a former [Apple](https://bliptext.com/articles/apple-inc) security engineer, found that a [software development kit](https://bliptext.com/articles/software-development-kit) (SDK) called AppMetrica, a product of Yandex, was harvesting data from more than 52,000 applications such as a user's [device fingerprint](https://bliptext.com/articles/device-fingerprint) and [IP address](https://bliptext.com/articles/ip-address) and storing it in Russia on Yandex's servers, which they said due to Russian law, and the nature of SDKs, could be accessed by Russian authorities without their knowledge and used to identify them.\nYandex said of identification by the data collected: \"Although theoretically possible, in practice it is extremely hard to identify users based solely on such information collected.\"\nOf authority requests for data they said: \"Any requests that fail to comply with all relevant procedural and legal requirements are turned down.\"\nAccording to [Meduza](https://bliptext.com/articles/meduza) investigation published on 5 May 2022, since 2016 the top-5 [news](https://bliptext.com/articles/news) on the Yandex's main page are formed on the basis of a secret list of Russian [media](https://bliptext.com/articles/media-communication) approved by [Presidential Administration of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/presidential-administration-of-russia), which includes only pro-Kremlin [media](https://bliptext.com/articles/media-communication).\nYandex stated that the highest-ranked news on its main page is generated automatically through its algorithm.\nBecause of laws around news aggregators, only news received from registered media sources may appear on it.\nIn March 2022, Yandex began to look for ways to offload its news aggregator and blogging-recommendation platform as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine as well as the Kremlin's increased control of the media and freedom of expression.\nYandex sought to focus on something that \"under no circumstances can be politicized in any way. Under the current conditions, it is impossible to continue developing content and information services that affect a large number of people.\"\nIn September 2022, Yandex sold its media assets.\nThe company transferred News, Zen, and also the main page yandex.ru to VK Holding.\n\n# Statistics and finance indicators\nThe largest Russian Internet company in revenue.\nBy the number of processed requests is in the top world search engines.\nAccording to the analytical service \"Yandex. Radar\", the company's share in the Russian search market (including search on mobile devices) in the third quarter of 2020 averaged 59.3%.\nIn the fourth quarter of 2019, on Android devices in Russia, the share of search queries to Yandex was 54.3%.\nThe number of search queries increased by 7% compared to the same period in the fourth quarter of 2018.\nDynamics of the daily number of search queries Yandex Search\nAfter the announcement on July 13, 2017 that Yandex.Taxi and Uber were merging their businesses, the market capitalization of Yandex on the NASDAQ stock exchange grew to $10.73 billion, and the value of Yandex shares during day increased by 15.99% to 31.7 dollars per paper.\nAt the end of 2019, consolidated revenue increased by 37% compared to 2018, to 175.4 billion rubles ($2,833.2 million).\nRevenue increased by 39% compared to 2018 (excluding Yandex. Market).\nThe company's net profit amounted to 11.2 billion rubles ($180.9 million) and, compared to 2018, decreased by 75%.\nIn February 2020, Russian Forbes estimated the company’s value at $14.6 billion, placing it first in the list of the most valuable companies on the Runet.","wordIndex":2,"createdAt":"2026-03-28T11:33:54.458Z","user":{"id":"fVfuG1yEPXYg9OQQ4HRhnnjvRwsd6BTp","name":"Konstantin","image":"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a/ACg8ocIG53MnbggDbV7dj-CyKkw2yJhJg3hgbZwjZl1HH24OaKHrqys=s96-c"}},{"id":"7d6c482a-f8ad-41b1-8d3f-716e022b0e95","wordChanged":"(Яндекс)","newWord":":::summary\n![Yandex LLC](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Yandex///main///office.jpg)\n**Name:** Yandex LLC \n**Native Name:** Яндекс \n**Logo Caption:** Logo used since 2021 \n**Image Caption:** Headquarters in Moscow \n**Type:** [Privately held company](https://bliptext.com/articles/privately-held-company) \n**Foundation:** 23 (Yandex search launched by CompTek) · 2007 (reincorporation of holding company in the Netherlands) \n**Location:** [Moscow](https://bliptext.com/articles/moscow), [Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/russia) \n**Founder:** Arkady Volozh · Arkady Borkovsky · Ilya Segalovich \n**Area Served:** Worldwide \n**Key People:** Artyom Savinovsky (CEO) \n**Num Employees:** 25 431 (2022) \n**Industry:** Internet · Search engine · Web mapping · Streaming media · Online shopping · Online food ordering \n**Products:** [List of Yandex products and services](https://bliptext.com/articles/list-of-yandex-products-and-services) \n**Homepage:** https://ya.ru \n**Owner:** Alexander Chachava (25%)
Pavel Prass (15%)
Lukoil (15%)
Alexander Ryazanov (10%)
Senior management (35%)
(It is speculated that the publicly identified owners are intermediaries for others) \n:::\n\n# \nYandeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeex Тындекс is a Russian [technology company](https://bliptext.com/articles/technology-company) that provides [Internet](https://bliptext.com/articles/internet)-related products and services including a [web browser](https://bliptext.com/articles/web-browser), [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine), [cloud computing](https://bliptext.com/articles/cloud-computing), [web mapping](https://bliptext.com/articles/web-mapping), [online food ordering](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-food-ordering), [streaming media](https://bliptext.com/articles/streaming-media), [online shopping](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-shopping), and a [ridesharing company](https://bliptext.com/articles/ridesharing-company).\n[Yandex Search](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-search) is the largest [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine) in Russia with an estimated 72% [market share](https://bliptext.com/articles/market-share) in Russia and a 2.8% [market share](https://bliptext.com/articles/market-share) worldwide.\n[Yandex Taxi](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-taxi) is the largest [ridesharing company](https://bliptext.com/articles/ridesharing-company) in Russia.\nYandex was founded by [Arkady Volozh](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-volozh) and launched its first product, a [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine), in 1997.\nDue to its significant media activities in Russia, the company has long faced pressure for control by the [government of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/government-of-russia).\nIn July 2024, in a transaction brought about by [international sanctions during the Russian invasion of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/international-sanctions-during-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine) and restrictions on foreign ownership, [Nebius Group](https://bliptext.com/articles/nebius-group), the Dutch holding company that owned Yandex, sold its Russian assets to a group of Russian investors for a discounted price of US$5.3 billion.\n\n# History\n[Arkady Volozh](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-volozh) and [Ilya Segalovich](https://bliptext.com/articles/ilya-segalovich) were friends from their school days in Kazakhstan in the 1980s.\nVolozh started developing algorithms to search in Russian texts and contacted Segalovich in 1990.\nThey worked together to develop search software, with the company name Arcadia.\nIn 1993, they invented the name \"[Yandex](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex)\" as an easy way to remember \"Yet Another iNDEXer\".\nThis is also a [bilingual pun](https://bliptext.com/articles/bilingual-pun) on \"index\" since \"Я\" (\"ya\") means \"I\" in Russian.\nOn September 23, 1997, the Yandex.ru search engine was launched and presented at the Softool exhibition in Moscow.\nArcadia became part of the software and computer part supply company, CompTek, and with Volozh as the CEO in 2000.\nIn 1998, Yandex launched [contextual advertisement](https://bliptext.com/articles/contextual-advertisement) on its search engine.\nIn 2000, Yandex was incorporated in Cyprus as a standalone company by Arkady Volozh.\nIn September 2005, it opened an office in Ukraine and launched www.yandex.ua.\nIn 2007, Yandex introduced a customized search engine for Ukrainian users; Yandex also opened its development center in Kyiv in May 2007.\nIn 2008, Yandex extended its presence in Ukraine by increasing bandwidth between Moscow data centers and UA-IX in Ukraine fivefold.\nIn 2009, all services of www.yandex.ua were localized for the Ukrainian market.\nIn 2010, Yandex launched its \"Poltava\" search engine algorithm for Ukrainian users, based on its [MatrixNet](https://bliptext.com/articles/matrixnet) technology.\nOn June 20, 2008, it announced the formation of Yandex Labs in [Silicon Valley](https://bliptext.com/articles/silicon-valley), to foster \"innovation in search and advertising technology\".\nOn 10 October 2017, Yandex introduced its voice assistant Alice.\nIn February 2018, the deal to merge Yandex.Taxi and Uber in Russia and five neighbouring countries closed.\nYandex's share in the new company, worth more than $3.8bn, was 59.3%.\nOn 9 October 2019, the company unveiled the second smart speaker of its own design - \"Yandex. Station Mini.\"\nIn 2020 Yandex published its internal operating principles.\nThere are more than 35 principles.\nThese include: \"We do not develop technology for military purposes\", \"We comply with the laws of each country that we operate in and try to constructively contribute to any proposed legislation that concerns technology or the market\", and \"The products and services that we make don't have any persuasion or political overtones.\"\nFor example, Yandex advertising services do not accept political ads.\nIn September 2020, Yandex spun off the direction of unmanned cars into a separate company, Yandex Self Driving Group.\nOn 10 March 2021, the company launched its own payment service Yandex Pay.\nIn the first half of September 2021, the IT company's servers were subjected to the largest DDoS attack in the history of the Runet.\nIn March 2022, executive director and deputy CEO Tigran Khudaverdyan resigned after EU sanctions.\nIn April, CEO [Elena Bunina](https://bliptext.com/articles/elena-bunina) resigned and moved to [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel).\nIn June, Volozh resigned.\nOn August 23, 2022, it was announced that Yandex is buying Delivery Club from [VK](https://bliptext.com/articles/vk-company) in exchange for [Yandex.Zen](https://bliptext.com/articles/zen-recommendation-system) and [Yandex.News](https://bliptext.com/articles/zen-news).\nIn September 2022, assets of Yandex and businessmen [Boris](https://bliptext.com/articles/boris-rotenberg-businessman) and [Arkady Rotenberg](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-rotenberg), who are close to President [Vladimir Putin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vladimir-putin), were [seized](https://bliptext.com/articles/seized) in [Finland](https://bliptext.com/articles/finland).\nIn December 2022 it became known that \"Yandex\" registered the company Beyond ML in Armenia.\nOn December 30, Arkady Volozh announced his departure from Yandex by publishing a letter to employees on the company's internal portal.\nOn May 17, 2023, Yandex launched its YaGPT neural network, analogous to the [ChatGPT](https://bliptext.com/articles/chatgpt) neural network.\nIn October 2023, Yandex Group's parent company, Yandex N.V. (Netherlands), received approval for internal restructuring from the government commission for controlling foreign investment in Russia.\nIn July 2024, Volozh announced his return to the parts of the business retained by Yandex N.V. (Netherlands) to be named [Nebius Group](https://bliptext.com/articles/nebius-group).\n(The EU lifted sanctions on Volozh in March 2024.) Volozh will be CEO of Nebius, according to Reuters.\n\n## Acquisitions\nIn March 2007, it acquired Russian [social networking service](https://bliptext.com/articles/social-networking-service) moikrug.ru.; on June 16, 2008, Yandex acquired SMILink, a Russian road traffic monitoring agency, to merge with Yandex.Maps services.\nIn September 2008, the company acquired the rights to the Punto Switcher software program, an automatic Russian to English keyboard layout switcher.\nIn September 2010, it invested in a $4.3 million financing round by [Face.com](https://bliptext.com/articles/face-com).\nThe company was acquired by [Facebook](https://bliptext.com/articles/facebook) in 2012.\nIn December 2010, the firm launched Yandex.Start to find startups and work with them systematically, and purchased WebVisor's behavior analysis technology in December 2010.\nIn September 2011, it invested in [Blekko](https://bliptext.com/articles/blekko) as part of a $30 million financing round.\nIn November 2011, it acquired software developer [SPB Software](https://bliptext.com/articles/spb-software) for $38 million.\nIn June 2012, it acquired a 25% stake in Seismotech, for $1 million.\nOn January 26, 2011, it introduced premium placement opportunity in its Business directory in which advertisers' local small businesses are highlighted.\nOn January 27, 2011, the company acquired single sign-in service Loginza.\nIn August 2011, Yandex acquired The Tweeted Times, a news delivery startup.\nIn September 2011, it launched a search engine and a range of other services in Turkey, opening an office in Istanbul.\nIn October 2013, the company acquired [KinoPoisk](https://bliptext.com/articles/kinopoisk), the biggest Russian movie search engine.\nIn February 2014, Yandex invested several million dollars in MultiShip.\nIn March 2014, it acquired [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel)i [geolocation](https://bliptext.com/articles/geolocation) startup [KitLocate](https://bliptext.com/articles/kitlocate) and opened a [research and development](https://bliptext.com/articles/research-and-development) (R&D) office in [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel).\nIn June 2014, it acquired Auto.ru, an [online marketplace](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-marketplace) and [classified advertising](https://bliptext.com/articles/classified-advertising) website for automobiles, for $175 million.\nIn December 2015, it acquired [Internet security](https://bliptext.com/articles/internet-security) company Agnitum.\nOn June 6, 2017, the company invested in a $5 million financing round by [Doc+](https://bliptext.com/articles/doc).\nIn December 2017, it acquired [food delivery](https://bliptext.com/articles/food-delivery) Foodfox.\nOn February 7, 2018, [Uber](https://bliptext.com/articles/uber) and Yandex NV merged their businesses in Russia, [Kazakhstan](https://bliptext.com/articles/kazakhstan), [Azerbaijan](https://bliptext.com/articles/azerbaijan), [Armenia](https://bliptext.com/articles/armenia), [Belarus](https://bliptext.com/articles/belarus) and [Georgia](https://bliptext.com/articles/georgia-country).\nUber invested $225 million and owns 36.6% stake in the venture while Yandex invested $100 million and owns a 59.3% stake.\nIn May 2018, [Sberbank](https://bliptext.com/articles/sberbank) and Yandex completed a joint venture deal to develop a B2C eCommerce ecosystem.\nIn October 2018, Yandex acquired Edadil (Russian: Едадил, lit. \"grocery deals\"), a deal aggregator service.\nIn June 2021, Yandex, [VTB Bank](https://bliptext.com/articles/vtb-bank), LANIT Group and computer hardware producer Gigabyte founded a joint venture to start producing servers in Russia in 2022.\nIn October 2021, construction of a new plant in [Ryazan Oblast](https://bliptext.com/articles/ryazan-oblast) was launched with 1 billion roubles during the first stage of investments.\nThe new plant will produce servers, data storage systems, gateways and smart equipment under \"Openyard\" brand.\nHowever, in June 2023 Yandex announced it was looking for ways to exit the joint venture.\nIn January 2022, Yandex acquired \"eLama\", digital advertising platform, waiting for the approval from [Federal Antimonopoly Service](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-antimonopoly-service).\nThat same month Yandex has also bought \"BandLink\" music service.\n\n## Finances\nThe company became profitable in November 2002.\nIn 2004, Yandex sales increased to $17 million, up 1000% in 2 years.\nThe net income of the company in 2004 was $7 million.\nIn June 2006, the weekly revenue of [Yandex.Direct](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-direct) context ads system exceeded $1 million.\nThe company's accounting has been audited by [Deloitte](https://bliptext.com/articles/deloitte) since 1999.\nBetween 2004 and 2006, Tiger Technologies obtained an 11% ownership stake.\nOn May 24, 2011, it raised $1.3 billion in an [initial public offering](https://bliptext.com/articles/initial-public-offering) on [NASDAQ](https://bliptext.com/articles/nasdaq), the biggest [initial public offering](https://bliptext.com/articles/initial-public-offering) for a [dot-com company](https://bliptext.com/articles/dot-com-company) since [Google](https://bliptext.com/articles/google)'s offering in 2004.\nAmong the largest investors were [Baring Vostok Capital Partners](https://bliptext.com/articles/baring-vostok-capital-partners), which owned a 30% stake, and Tiger Technologies, which owned a 15% stake.\nIn 2013, Yandex became the largest media property in Russia by revenue.\nIn March 2022, Yandex warned shareholders about the risk of default if holders of Yandex N.V. wished to use their right to pay them off early.\nBefore that, the trading of Yandex securities on the NASDAQ was suspended due to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.\nIn September 2022, Yandex bought back 98.7% of issued Yandex N.V convertible bonds.\nIn April 2022, TechCrunch reported that Yandex signed an agreement with VK holding with regard to the sale of News and Zen media services together with the main page yandex.ru\nIn September 2022, News, Zen, and yandex.ru were transferred to a new owner.\nAt the same time ya.ru became Yandex's new main page as well as the key entry point for Search, Mail, and other non-media services.\nIn November 2022, the board of directors of Yandex N.V. announced a possible restructuring of the company.\nThe main part of the business would be placed into a separate group of companies that will keep the Yandex brand, which may be registered in Russia.\nThe international parts of some businesses will be placed into separate companies under the control of Dutch Yandex N.V., which will eventually leave the shareholders of the Russian Yandex Group.\nIn March 2023, the NASDAQ exchange announced its intention to delist Yandex and a number of other companies doing business in Russia.\nYandex appealed this decision.\nNASDAQ granted the appeal, given the company's plans to separate the Russian and foreign businesses.\nThe suspension of trading remains in effect.\nIn May 2023, Yandex announced that it received applications from potential investors for the purchase of an economic share in the company.\nEconomic investors will not be able to influence the company's activities.\nVoting control and management will remain with the top management of Yandex.\nAmong the main applicants were private industrial investors [Vagit Alekperov](https://bliptext.com/articles/vagit-alekperov) (Lukoil Founder) and [Vladimir Potanin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vladimir-potanin).\n\n# Offices\nIn 2008, Yandex opened a technology and business development unit called Yandex Labs in [Silicon Valley](https://bliptext.com/articles/silicon-valley).\nIn 2011, the [Istanbul](https://bliptext.com/articles/istanbul) office was launched together with the company's web portal in Turkey in 2011.\nIn 2012, the company opened its first European office in [Lucerne](https://bliptext.com/articles/lucerne) to serve advertising clients in the EU.\nIts first [research and development](https://bliptext.com/articles/research-and-development) office in Europe started operating in [Berlin](https://bliptext.com/articles/berlin) in 2014.\nIn 2015, the company's [Shanghai](https://bliptext.com/articles/shanghai) office was launched to facilitate work with Chinese companies operating on the Russian language market.\nAs of 2018 it had more than 30 offices worldwide.\nIn December 2021 a new location in Prague was added to accommodate the company's rapidly expanding crowdsourcing, routing, cloud computing, ridesharing and weather forecasting teams.\nAs of 2021, Yandex had offices in 12 countries.\n\n# Products and services\nIn 2001, the company launched the [Yandex.Direct](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-direct) [online advertising](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-advertising) network.\nIn January 2009, [Mozilla Firefox 3.5](https://bliptext.com/articles/mozilla-firefox-3-5) replaced Google with Yandex as the default search provider for Russian-language builds.\nIn August 2009, the company introduced a player of free legal music in its search results.\nIn September 2010, Yandex launched [Yandex Music](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-music), a music streaming service, with a catalogue of 800,000 tracks from 58,000 performers.\nOn 19 May 2010, it launched an English-only web search engine.\nIn March 2013, the company added an English [user interface](https://bliptext.com/articles/user-interface) to its translation [mobile app](https://bliptext.com/articles/mobile-app).\nIn July 2013, [Mail.Ru](https://bliptext.com/articles/vk-company) started placing Yandex Direct ads on its search result pages.\nOn 10 October 2017, the company introduced its [intelligent personal assistant](https://bliptext.com/articles/intelligent-personal-assistant), [Alisa](https://bliptext.com/articles/alisa-virtual-assistant) (Alice), for [Android](https://bliptext.com/articles/android-operating-system), [iOS](https://bliptext.com/articles/ios), and [Microsoft Windows](https://bliptext.com/articles/microsoft-windows).\nOn 28 April 2022, Yandex announced that it had sold its news and blogging products to VK.\nIn 2022, following the [Russian invasion of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/russian-invasion-of-ukraine), the [Bureau of Investigative Journalism](https://bliptext.com/articles/bureau-of-investigative-journalism) said that Yandex-delivered ads promoted misinformation about the war in Ukraine which were produced by more than half a dozen Russian-language news sites.\nMany of the articles displayed in Yandex's news aggregators were also from Russian state-owned and state-sponsored sources while the top search results about the war would sometimes prominently feature pro-war websites.\n\n## Search\n\n## Games\n**Yandex.Games** is an Internet gaming platform made by Yandex, which is available on both browser and mobile.\nAs of 2022, the number of games included in the catalog exceeded 10,000, with more than 11 million players a month.\nThe platform provides two types of income: advertising and in-app purchases.\nThere is also an in-game currency called \"Yans\".\nDevelopers add their games to the catalog independently and edit them in the future.\nAll games are [moderated](https://bliptext.com/articles/moderation).\nMandatory requirements include integration with the Yandex.Games SDK, support for [HTTPS](https://bliptext.com/articles/https) and offline Service Worker mode.\nGame developers follow the updates of the platform in the blog, and content is provided by companies all over the world (e.g. Dutch media platform Azerion ).\nIn addition to a wide system of user ratings and reviews, the service uses complex algorithms to create personalized collections: games that have already been played, or those that are likely to be played.\n\n## Technologies\nOn 16 February 2018, the company showed off the first tests of its [autonomous cars](https://bliptext.com/articles/autonomous-car) in Moscow.\nOn 5 December 2018, Yandex announced the release of their first smartphone, the Yandex.Phone.\nIn May 2023, Yandex implemented the YandexGPT generative neural network in the virtual assistant [Alice](https://bliptext.com/articles/alice-virtual-assistant).\nBetween 2021 and 2023, Yandex introduced automatic voice-over translation for any YouTube video in English, Chinese, French, Spanish and German.\nOn 7 June 2023, the company launched a test of its first self-driving taxi in Moscow.\n\n## Facial recognition on cameras\nThe Kremlin planned in 2024 to use NTechLab's software for a secret center that will collect and analyze CCTV footage from across Russia.\nThe aim of the project is to 'identify threats in a timely manner' and 'monitor individuals for destructive and/or disloyal behavior'.\n\n## Open source\nIn 2009, Yandex began development on its project [MatrixNet](https://bliptext.com/articles/matrixnet).\nIt was a unique patented algorithm for the building of machine learning models, which used one of the original gradient boosting schemes.\nIn July 2017, the [CatBoost](https://bliptext.com/articles/catboost) library was released to the public.\nIt implements the Matrixnet algorithm for the building of machine learning models.\nAt the time of release, the technology was already in use as part of a collaborative project with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to analyze the results of conducted particle experiments CatBoost is used by foreign companies.\nFor example: [JetBrains](https://bliptext.com/articles/jetbrains) uses it for code completion, [CloudFlare](https://bliptext.com/articles/cloudflare) for bot detection, and [Careem](https://bliptext.com/articles/careem) for trip-distance determination.\nIn 2012, Yandex began research and development within the field of natural-speech processing.\nAnd in October 2023, the company introduced Yandex SpeechKit.\nIt is a speech-recognition and synthesis technology as well as a public API for speech recognition that Android and iOS developers can use.\nIn 2022, the company published the source code for the [YDB](https://bliptext.com/articles/ydb-database) database management system.\nIt is used in its own voice assistant Alice as well as in Yandex.Go and [Yandex Market](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-market) services.\nIn 2023, Yandex published the source code for YTsaurus.\nIt is a platform for work with big data.\n\n## Investments\nYandex is an [investor](https://bliptext.com/articles/investor) in several foreign companies.\nExamples include: Vizi Labs, [Face.com](https://bliptext.com/articles/face-com), [Blekko](https://bliptext.com/articles/blekko), and SalesPredict.\n\n# Security\nOn June 1, 2017, Yandex closed its offices in [Kyiv](https://bliptext.com/articles/kyiv) and [Odesa](https://bliptext.com/articles/odesa), Ukraine after the [Security Service of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/security-service-of-ukraine) raided the offices and accused the company of illegally collecting Ukrainian users' data and sending it to Russian security agencies.\nThe firm denied any wrongdoing.\nIn May 2017, all Yandex services were banned in Ukraine by Presidential Decree No. 133/2017.\nIn October and November 2018, Yandex was targeted in a cyberattack using the [Regin](https://bliptext.com/articles/regin-malware) malware, aimed at stealing technical information from its research and development unit on how users were authenticated.\nAn investigation by [Kaspersky Lab](https://bliptext.com/articles/kaspersky-lab) attributed the hacks to [Five Eyes](https://bliptext.com/articles/five-eyes) intelligence agencies.\nIn June 2019, [RBC](https://bliptext.com/articles/rbc-group) News reported that Yandex had refused a request by the Russian [Federal Security Service](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-security-service) (FSB) under the [Yarovaya law](https://bliptext.com/articles/yarovaya-law) to surrender encryption keys that could decrypt the private data of its e-mail service and cloud storage users.\nThe company argued that it was impossible to comply with the relevant law without compromising its users' privacy.\n[Maxim Akimov](https://bliptext.com/articles/maxim-akimov), [Deputy Prime Minister of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/deputy-prime-minister-of-russia), said that the government would take action to relieve FSB pressure on the company.\n[Alexander Zharov](https://bliptext.com/articles/alexander-zharov), head of the [Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-service-for-supervision-of-communications-information-technology-and-mass-media), subsequently said that Yandex and the FSB had reached an agreement where the company would provide the required data without handing over the encryption keys.\nIn February 2021 Yandex admitted that one of their system administrators with access rights to Yandex's email service had enabled unauthorized access, leading to almost 5,000 Yandex email inboxes being compromised.\nOn January 25, 2023, a leaked archive with approx. 44 GB of Yandex services was shared on BreachForums via [BitTorrent](https://bliptext.com/articles/bittorrent).\nIn June 2023 Yandex was fined by the Moscow court for its repeated refusal to share user information with the Federal Security Service.\n\n# News and media\nIn April 2014, a [film](https://bliptext.com/articles/film) about the history of Yandex called Startup was released.\nOn 20 April 2020, as a result of the [COVID-19 pandemic in Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/covid-19-pandemic-in-russia), Yandex made its home coronavirus testing service free of charge for all residents of Moscow and its surroundings, extending it to other regions in the future.\nPreviously, it announced the launch of the service on 16 April.\nIn late March 2022, Yandex was the subject of a [Financial Times](https://bliptext.com/articles/financial-times) investigation that had been initiated by the [nonprofit organization](https://bliptext.com/articles/nonprofit-organization) Me2B Alliance as part of an application auditing campaign led by researcher Zach Edwards.\nEdwards and four expert researchers, including [Cher Scarlett](https://bliptext.com/articles/cher-scarlett), a former [Apple](https://bliptext.com/articles/apple-inc) security engineer, found that a [software development kit](https://bliptext.com/articles/software-development-kit) (SDK) called AppMetrica, a product of Yandex, was harvesting data from more than 52,000 applications such as a user's [device fingerprint](https://bliptext.com/articles/device-fingerprint) and [IP address](https://bliptext.com/articles/ip-address) and storing it in Russia on Yandex's servers, which they said due to Russian law, and the nature of SDKs, could be accessed by Russian authorities without their knowledge and used to identify them.\nYandex said of identification by the data collected: \"Although theoretically possible, in practice it is extremely hard to identify users based solely on such information collected.\"\nOf authority requests for data they said: \"Any requests that fail to comply with all relevant procedural and legal requirements are turned down.\"\nAccording to [Meduza](https://bliptext.com/articles/meduza) investigation published on 5 May 2022, since 2016 the top-5 [news](https://bliptext.com/articles/news) on the Yandex's main page are formed on the basis of a secret list of Russian [media](https://bliptext.com/articles/media-communication) approved by [Presidential Administration of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/presidential-administration-of-russia), which includes only pro-Kremlin [media](https://bliptext.com/articles/media-communication).\nYandex stated that the highest-ranked news on its main page is generated automatically through its algorithm.\nBecause of laws around news aggregators, only news received from registered media sources may appear on it.\nIn March 2022, Yandex began to look for ways to offload its news aggregator and blogging-recommendation platform as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine as well as the Kremlin's increased control of the media and freedom of expression.\nYandex sought to focus on something that \"under no circumstances can be politicized in any way. Under the current conditions, it is impossible to continue developing content and information services that affect a large number of people.\"\nIn September 2022, Yandex sold its media assets.\nThe company transferred News, Zen, and also the main page yandex.ru to VK Holding.\n\n# Statistics and finance indicators\nThe largest Russian Internet company in revenue.\nBy the number of processed requests is in the top world search engines.\nAccording to the analytical service \"Yandex. Radar\", the company's share in the Russian search market (including search on mobile devices) in the third quarter of 2020 averaged 59.3%.\nIn the fourth quarter of 2019, on Android devices in Russia, the share of search queries to Yandex was 54.3%.\nThe number of search queries increased by 7% compared to the same period in the fourth quarter of 2018.\nDynamics of the daily number of search queries Yandex Search\nAfter the announcement on July 13, 2017 that Yandex.Taxi and Uber were merging their businesses, the market capitalization of Yandex on the NASDAQ stock exchange grew to $10.73 billion, and the value of Yandex shares during day increased by 15.99% to 31.7 dollars per paper.\nAt the end of 2019, consolidated revenue increased by 37% compared to 2018, to 175.4 billion rubles ($2,833.2 million).\nRevenue increased by 39% compared to 2018 (excluding Yandex. Market).\nThe company's net profit amounted to 11.2 billion rubles ($180.9 million) and, compared to 2018, decreased by 75%.\nIn February 2020, Russian Forbes estimated the company’s value at $14.6 billion, placing it first in the list of the most valuable companies on the Runet.","wordIndex":2,"createdAt":"2026-03-28T11:32:24.986Z","user":{"id":"fVfuG1yEPXYg9OQQ4HRhnnjvRwsd6BTp","name":"Konstantin","image":"https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/a/ACg8ocIG53MnbggDbV7dj-CyKkw2yJhJg3hgbZwjZl1HH24OaKHrqys=s96-c"}},{"id":"3704e7fa-df6f-4699-acc9-206085defd31","wordChanged":"**Yandex LLC**","newWord":":::summary\n![Yandex LLC](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Yandex///main///office.jpg)\n**Name:** Yandex LLC \n**Native Name:** Яндекс \n**Logo Caption:** Logo used since 2021 \n**Image Caption:** Headquarters in Moscow \n**Type:** [Privately held company](https://bliptext.com/articles/privately-held-company) \n**Foundation:** 23 (Yandex search launched by CompTek) · 2007 (reincorporation of holding company in the Netherlands) \n**Location:** [Moscow](https://bliptext.com/articles/moscow), [Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/russia) \n**Founder:** Arkady Volozh · Arkady Borkovsky · Ilya Segalovich \n**Area Served:** Worldwide \n**Key People:** Artyom Savinovsky (CEO) \n**Num Employees:** 25 431 (2022) \n**Industry:** Internet · Search engine · Web mapping · Streaming media · Online shopping · Online food ordering \n**Products:** [List of Yandex products and services](https://bliptext.com/articles/list-of-yandex-products-and-services) \n**Homepage:** https://ya.ru \n**Owner:** Alexander Chachava (25%)
Pavel Prass (15%)
Lukoil (15%)
Alexander Ryazanov (10%)
Senior management (35%)
(It is speculated that the publicly identified owners are intermediaries for others) \n:::\n\n# \nYandeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeex (Яндекс) is a Russian [technology company](https://bliptext.com/articles/technology-company) that provides [Internet](https://bliptext.com/articles/internet)-related products and services including a [web browser](https://bliptext.com/articles/web-browser), [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine), [cloud computing](https://bliptext.com/articles/cloud-computing), [web mapping](https://bliptext.com/articles/web-mapping), [online food ordering](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-food-ordering), [streaming media](https://bliptext.com/articles/streaming-media), [online shopping](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-shopping), and a [ridesharing company](https://bliptext.com/articles/ridesharing-company).\n[Yandex Search](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-search) is the largest [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine) in Russia with an estimated 72% [market share](https://bliptext.com/articles/market-share) in Russia and a 2.8% [market share](https://bliptext.com/articles/market-share) worldwide.\n[Yandex Taxi](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-taxi) is the largest [ridesharing company](https://bliptext.com/articles/ridesharing-company) in Russia.\nYandex was founded by [Arkady Volozh](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-volozh) and launched its first product, a [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine), in 1997.\nDue to its significant media activities in Russia, the company has long faced pressure for control by the [government of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/government-of-russia).\nIn July 2024, in a transaction brought about by [international sanctions during the Russian invasion of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/international-sanctions-during-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine) and restrictions on foreign ownership, [Nebius Group](https://bliptext.com/articles/nebius-group), the Dutch holding company that owned Yandex, sold its Russian assets to a group of Russian investors for a discounted price of US$5.3 billion.\n\n# History\n[Arkady Volozh](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-volozh) and [Ilya Segalovich](https://bliptext.com/articles/ilya-segalovich) were friends from their school days in Kazakhstan in the 1980s.\nVolozh started developing algorithms to search in Russian texts and contacted Segalovich in 1990.\nThey worked together to develop search software, with the company name Arcadia.\nIn 1993, they invented the name \"[Yandex](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex)\" as an easy way to remember \"Yet Another iNDEXer\".\nThis is also a [bilingual pun](https://bliptext.com/articles/bilingual-pun) on \"index\" since \"Я\" (\"ya\") means \"I\" in Russian.\nOn September 23, 1997, the Yandex.ru search engine was launched and presented at the Softool exhibition in Moscow.\nArcadia became part of the software and computer part supply company, CompTek, and with Volozh as the CEO in 2000.\nIn 1998, Yandex launched [contextual advertisement](https://bliptext.com/articles/contextual-advertisement) on its search engine.\nIn 2000, Yandex was incorporated in Cyprus as a standalone company by Arkady Volozh.\nIn September 2005, it opened an office in Ukraine and launched www.yandex.ua.\nIn 2007, Yandex introduced a customized search engine for Ukrainian users; Yandex also opened its development center in Kyiv in May 2007.\nIn 2008, Yandex extended its presence in Ukraine by increasing bandwidth between Moscow data centers and UA-IX in Ukraine fivefold.\nIn 2009, all services of www.yandex.ua were localized for the Ukrainian market.\nIn 2010, Yandex launched its \"Poltava\" search engine algorithm for Ukrainian users, based on its [MatrixNet](https://bliptext.com/articles/matrixnet) technology.\nOn June 20, 2008, it announced the formation of Yandex Labs in [Silicon Valley](https://bliptext.com/articles/silicon-valley), to foster \"innovation in search and advertising technology\".\nOn 10 October 2017, Yandex introduced its voice assistant Alice.\nIn February 2018, the deal to merge Yandex.Taxi and Uber in Russia and five neighbouring countries closed.\nYandex's share in the new company, worth more than $3.8bn, was 59.3%.\nOn 9 October 2019, the company unveiled the second smart speaker of its own design - \"Yandex. Station Mini.\"\nIn 2020 Yandex published its internal operating principles.\nThere are more than 35 principles.\nThese include: \"We do not develop technology for military purposes\", \"We comply with the laws of each country that we operate in and try to constructively contribute to any proposed legislation that concerns technology or the market\", and \"The products and services that we make don't have any persuasion or political overtones.\"\nFor example, Yandex advertising services do not accept political ads.\nIn September 2020, Yandex spun off the direction of unmanned cars into a separate company, Yandex Self Driving Group.\nOn 10 March 2021, the company launched its own payment service Yandex Pay.\nIn the first half of September 2021, the IT company's servers were subjected to the largest DDoS attack in the history of the Runet.\nIn March 2022, executive director and deputy CEO Tigran Khudaverdyan resigned after EU sanctions.\nIn April, CEO [Elena Bunina](https://bliptext.com/articles/elena-bunina) resigned and moved to [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel).\nIn June, Volozh resigned.\nOn August 23, 2022, it was announced that Yandex is buying Delivery Club from [VK](https://bliptext.com/articles/vk-company) in exchange for [Yandex.Zen](https://bliptext.com/articles/zen-recommendation-system) and [Yandex.News](https://bliptext.com/articles/zen-news).\nIn September 2022, assets of Yandex and businessmen [Boris](https://bliptext.com/articles/boris-rotenberg-businessman) and [Arkady Rotenberg](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-rotenberg), who are close to President [Vladimir Putin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vladimir-putin), were [seized](https://bliptext.com/articles/seized) in [Finland](https://bliptext.com/articles/finland).\nIn December 2022 it became known that \"Yandex\" registered the company Beyond ML in Armenia.\nOn December 30, Arkady Volozh announced his departure from Yandex by publishing a letter to employees on the company's internal portal.\nOn May 17, 2023, Yandex launched its YaGPT neural network, analogous to the [ChatGPT](https://bliptext.com/articles/chatgpt) neural network.\nIn October 2023, Yandex Group's parent company, Yandex N.V. (Netherlands), received approval for internal restructuring from the government commission for controlling foreign investment in Russia.\nIn July 2024, Volozh announced his return to the parts of the business retained by Yandex N.V. (Netherlands) to be named [Nebius Group](https://bliptext.com/articles/nebius-group).\n(The EU lifted sanctions on Volozh in March 2024.) Volozh will be CEO of Nebius, according to Reuters.\n\n## Acquisitions\nIn March 2007, it acquired Russian [social networking service](https://bliptext.com/articles/social-networking-service) moikrug.ru.; on June 16, 2008, Yandex acquired SMILink, a Russian road traffic monitoring agency, to merge with Yandex.Maps services.\nIn September 2008, the company acquired the rights to the Punto Switcher software program, an automatic Russian to English keyboard layout switcher.\nIn September 2010, it invested in a $4.3 million financing round by [Face.com](https://bliptext.com/articles/face-com).\nThe company was acquired by [Facebook](https://bliptext.com/articles/facebook) in 2012.\nIn December 2010, the firm launched Yandex.Start to find startups and work with them systematically, and purchased WebVisor's behavior analysis technology in December 2010.\nIn September 2011, it invested in [Blekko](https://bliptext.com/articles/blekko) as part of a $30 million financing round.\nIn November 2011, it acquired software developer [SPB Software](https://bliptext.com/articles/spb-software) for $38 million.\nIn June 2012, it acquired a 25% stake in Seismotech, for $1 million.\nOn January 26, 2011, it introduced premium placement opportunity in its Business directory in which advertisers' local small businesses are highlighted.\nOn January 27, 2011, the company acquired single sign-in service Loginza.\nIn August 2011, Yandex acquired The Tweeted Times, a news delivery startup.\nIn September 2011, it launched a search engine and a range of other services in Turkey, opening an office in Istanbul.\nIn October 2013, the company acquired [KinoPoisk](https://bliptext.com/articles/kinopoisk), the biggest Russian movie search engine.\nIn February 2014, Yandex invested several million dollars in MultiShip.\nIn March 2014, it acquired [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel)i [geolocation](https://bliptext.com/articles/geolocation) startup [KitLocate](https://bliptext.com/articles/kitlocate) and opened a [research and development](https://bliptext.com/articles/research-and-development) (R&D) office in [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel).\nIn June 2014, it acquired Auto.ru, an [online marketplace](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-marketplace) and [classified advertising](https://bliptext.com/articles/classified-advertising) website for automobiles, for $175 million.\nIn December 2015, it acquired [Internet security](https://bliptext.com/articles/internet-security) company Agnitum.\nOn June 6, 2017, the company invested in a $5 million financing round by [Doc+](https://bliptext.com/articles/doc).\nIn December 2017, it acquired [food delivery](https://bliptext.com/articles/food-delivery) Foodfox.\nOn February 7, 2018, [Uber](https://bliptext.com/articles/uber) and Yandex NV merged their businesses in Russia, [Kazakhstan](https://bliptext.com/articles/kazakhstan), [Azerbaijan](https://bliptext.com/articles/azerbaijan), [Armenia](https://bliptext.com/articles/armenia), [Belarus](https://bliptext.com/articles/belarus) and [Georgia](https://bliptext.com/articles/georgia-country).\nUber invested $225 million and owns 36.6% stake in the venture while Yandex invested $100 million and owns a 59.3% stake.\nIn May 2018, [Sberbank](https://bliptext.com/articles/sberbank) and Yandex completed a joint venture deal to develop a B2C eCommerce ecosystem.\nIn October 2018, Yandex acquired Edadil (Russian: Едадил, lit. \"grocery deals\"), a deal aggregator service.\nIn June 2021, Yandex, [VTB Bank](https://bliptext.com/articles/vtb-bank), LANIT Group and computer hardware producer Gigabyte founded a joint venture to start producing servers in Russia in 2022.\nIn October 2021, construction of a new plant in [Ryazan Oblast](https://bliptext.com/articles/ryazan-oblast) was launched with 1 billion roubles during the first stage of investments.\nThe new plant will produce servers, data storage systems, gateways and smart equipment under \"Openyard\" brand.\nHowever, in June 2023 Yandex announced it was looking for ways to exit the joint venture.\nIn January 2022, Yandex acquired \"eLama\", digital advertising platform, waiting for the approval from [Federal Antimonopoly Service](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-antimonopoly-service).\nThat same month Yandex has also bought \"BandLink\" music service.\n\n## Finances\nThe company became profitable in November 2002.\nIn 2004, Yandex sales increased to $17 million, up 1000% in 2 years.\nThe net income of the company in 2004 was $7 million.\nIn June 2006, the weekly revenue of [Yandex.Direct](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-direct) context ads system exceeded $1 million.\nThe company's accounting has been audited by [Deloitte](https://bliptext.com/articles/deloitte) since 1999.\nBetween 2004 and 2006, Tiger Technologies obtained an 11% ownership stake.\nOn May 24, 2011, it raised $1.3 billion in an [initial public offering](https://bliptext.com/articles/initial-public-offering) on [NASDAQ](https://bliptext.com/articles/nasdaq), the biggest [initial public offering](https://bliptext.com/articles/initial-public-offering) for a [dot-com company](https://bliptext.com/articles/dot-com-company) since [Google](https://bliptext.com/articles/google)'s offering in 2004.\nAmong the largest investors were [Baring Vostok Capital Partners](https://bliptext.com/articles/baring-vostok-capital-partners), which owned a 30% stake, and Tiger Technologies, which owned a 15% stake.\nIn 2013, Yandex became the largest media property in Russia by revenue.\nIn March 2022, Yandex warned shareholders about the risk of default if holders of Yandex N.V. wished to use their right to pay them off early.\nBefore that, the trading of Yandex securities on the NASDAQ was suspended due to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.\nIn September 2022, Yandex bought back 98.7% of issued Yandex N.V convertible bonds.\nIn April 2022, TechCrunch reported that Yandex signed an agreement with VK holding with regard to the sale of News and Zen media services together with the main page yandex.ru\nIn September 2022, News, Zen, and yandex.ru were transferred to a new owner.\nAt the same time ya.ru became Yandex's new main page as well as the key entry point for Search, Mail, and other non-media services.\nIn November 2022, the board of directors of Yandex N.V. announced a possible restructuring of the company.\nThe main part of the business would be placed into a separate group of companies that will keep the Yandex brand, which may be registered in Russia.\nThe international parts of some businesses will be placed into separate companies under the control of Dutch Yandex N.V., which will eventually leave the shareholders of the Russian Yandex Group.\nIn March 2023, the NASDAQ exchange announced its intention to delist Yandex and a number of other companies doing business in Russia.\nYandex appealed this decision.\nNASDAQ granted the appeal, given the company's plans to separate the Russian and foreign businesses.\nThe suspension of trading remains in effect.\nIn May 2023, Yandex announced that it received applications from potential investors for the purchase of an economic share in the company.\nEconomic investors will not be able to influence the company's activities.\nVoting control and management will remain with the top management of Yandex.\nAmong the main applicants were private industrial investors [Vagit Alekperov](https://bliptext.com/articles/vagit-alekperov) (Lukoil Founder) and [Vladimir Potanin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vladimir-potanin).\n\n# Offices\nIn 2008, Yandex opened a technology and business development unit called Yandex Labs in [Silicon Valley](https://bliptext.com/articles/silicon-valley).\nIn 2011, the [Istanbul](https://bliptext.com/articles/istanbul) office was launched together with the company's web portal in Turkey in 2011.\nIn 2012, the company opened its first European office in [Lucerne](https://bliptext.com/articles/lucerne) to serve advertising clients in the EU.\nIts first [research and development](https://bliptext.com/articles/research-and-development) office in Europe started operating in [Berlin](https://bliptext.com/articles/berlin) in 2014.\nIn 2015, the company's [Shanghai](https://bliptext.com/articles/shanghai) office was launched to facilitate work with Chinese companies operating on the Russian language market.\nAs of 2018 it had more than 30 offices worldwide.\nIn December 2021 a new location in Prague was added to accommodate the company's rapidly expanding crowdsourcing, routing, cloud computing, ridesharing and weather forecasting teams.\nAs of 2021, Yandex had offices in 12 countries.\n\n# Products and services\nIn 2001, the company launched the [Yandex.Direct](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-direct) [online advertising](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-advertising) network.\nIn January 2009, [Mozilla Firefox 3.5](https://bliptext.com/articles/mozilla-firefox-3-5) replaced Google with Yandex as the default search provider for Russian-language builds.\nIn August 2009, the company introduced a player of free legal music in its search results.\nIn September 2010, Yandex launched [Yandex Music](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-music), a music streaming service, with a catalogue of 800,000 tracks from 58,000 performers.\nOn 19 May 2010, it launched an English-only web search engine.\nIn March 2013, the company added an English [user interface](https://bliptext.com/articles/user-interface) to its translation [mobile app](https://bliptext.com/articles/mobile-app).\nIn July 2013, [Mail.Ru](https://bliptext.com/articles/vk-company) started placing Yandex Direct ads on its search result pages.\nOn 10 October 2017, the company introduced its [intelligent personal assistant](https://bliptext.com/articles/intelligent-personal-assistant), [Alisa](https://bliptext.com/articles/alisa-virtual-assistant) (Alice), for [Android](https://bliptext.com/articles/android-operating-system), [iOS](https://bliptext.com/articles/ios), and [Microsoft Windows](https://bliptext.com/articles/microsoft-windows).\nOn 28 April 2022, Yandex announced that it had sold its news and blogging products to VK.\nIn 2022, following the [Russian invasion of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/russian-invasion-of-ukraine), the [Bureau of Investigative Journalism](https://bliptext.com/articles/bureau-of-investigative-journalism) said that Yandex-delivered ads promoted misinformation about the war in Ukraine which were produced by more than half a dozen Russian-language news sites.\nMany of the articles displayed in Yandex's news aggregators were also from Russian state-owned and state-sponsored sources while the top search results about the war would sometimes prominently feature pro-war websites.\n\n## Search\n\n## Games\n**Yandex.Games** is an Internet gaming platform made by Yandex, which is available on both browser and mobile.\nAs of 2022, the number of games included in the catalog exceeded 10,000, with more than 11 million players a month.\nThe platform provides two types of income: advertising and in-app purchases.\nThere is also an in-game currency called \"Yans\".\nDevelopers add their games to the catalog independently and edit them in the future.\nAll games are [moderated](https://bliptext.com/articles/moderation).\nMandatory requirements include integration with the Yandex.Games SDK, support for [HTTPS](https://bliptext.com/articles/https) and offline Service Worker mode.\nGame developers follow the updates of the platform in the blog, and content is provided by companies all over the world (e.g. Dutch media platform Azerion ).\nIn addition to a wide system of user ratings and reviews, the service uses complex algorithms to create personalized collections: games that have already been played, or those that are likely to be played.\n\n## Technologies\nOn 16 February 2018, the company showed off the first tests of its [autonomous cars](https://bliptext.com/articles/autonomous-car) in Moscow.\nOn 5 December 2018, Yandex announced the release of their first smartphone, the Yandex.Phone.\nIn May 2023, Yandex implemented the YandexGPT generative neural network in the virtual assistant [Alice](https://bliptext.com/articles/alice-virtual-assistant).\nBetween 2021 and 2023, Yandex introduced automatic voice-over translation for any YouTube video in English, Chinese, French, Spanish and German.\nOn 7 June 2023, the company launched a test of its first self-driving taxi in Moscow.\n\n## Facial recognition on cameras\nThe Kremlin planned in 2024 to use NTechLab's software for a secret center that will collect and analyze CCTV footage from across Russia.\nThe aim of the project is to 'identify threats in a timely manner' and 'monitor individuals for destructive and/or disloyal behavior'.\n\n## Open source\nIn 2009, Yandex began development on its project [MatrixNet](https://bliptext.com/articles/matrixnet).\nIt was a unique patented algorithm for the building of machine learning models, which used one of the original gradient boosting schemes.\nIn July 2017, the [CatBoost](https://bliptext.com/articles/catboost) library was released to the public.\nIt implements the Matrixnet algorithm for the building of machine learning models.\nAt the time of release, the technology was already in use as part of a collaborative project with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to analyze the results of conducted particle experiments CatBoost is used by foreign companies.\nFor example: [JetBrains](https://bliptext.com/articles/jetbrains) uses it for code completion, [CloudFlare](https://bliptext.com/articles/cloudflare) for bot detection, and [Careem](https://bliptext.com/articles/careem) for trip-distance determination.\nIn 2012, Yandex began research and development within the field of natural-speech processing.\nAnd in October 2023, the company introduced Yandex SpeechKit.\nIt is a speech-recognition and synthesis technology as well as a public API for speech recognition that Android and iOS developers can use.\nIn 2022, the company published the source code for the [YDB](https://bliptext.com/articles/ydb-database) database management system.\nIt is used in its own voice assistant Alice as well as in Yandex.Go and [Yandex Market](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-market) services.\nIn 2023, Yandex published the source code for YTsaurus.\nIt is a platform for work with big data.\n\n## Investments\nYandex is an [investor](https://bliptext.com/articles/investor) in several foreign companies.\nExamples include: Vizi Labs, [Face.com](https://bliptext.com/articles/face-com), [Blekko](https://bliptext.com/articles/blekko), and SalesPredict.\n\n# Security\nOn June 1, 2017, Yandex closed its offices in [Kyiv](https://bliptext.com/articles/kyiv) and [Odesa](https://bliptext.com/articles/odesa), Ukraine after the [Security Service of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/security-service-of-ukraine) raided the offices and accused the company of illegally collecting Ukrainian users' data and sending it to Russian security agencies.\nThe firm denied any wrongdoing.\nIn May 2017, all Yandex services were banned in Ukraine by Presidential Decree No. 133/2017.\nIn October and November 2018, Yandex was targeted in a cyberattack using the [Regin](https://bliptext.com/articles/regin-malware) malware, aimed at stealing technical information from its research and development unit on how users were authenticated.\nAn investigation by [Kaspersky Lab](https://bliptext.com/articles/kaspersky-lab) attributed the hacks to [Five Eyes](https://bliptext.com/articles/five-eyes) intelligence agencies.\nIn June 2019, [RBC](https://bliptext.com/articles/rbc-group) News reported that Yandex had refused a request by the Russian [Federal Security Service](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-security-service) (FSB) under the [Yarovaya law](https://bliptext.com/articles/yarovaya-law) to surrender encryption keys that could decrypt the private data of its e-mail service and cloud storage users.\nThe company argued that it was impossible to comply with the relevant law without compromising its users' privacy.\n[Maxim Akimov](https://bliptext.com/articles/maxim-akimov), [Deputy Prime Minister of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/deputy-prime-minister-of-russia), said that the government would take action to relieve FSB pressure on the company.\n[Alexander Zharov](https://bliptext.com/articles/alexander-zharov), head of the [Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-service-for-supervision-of-communications-information-technology-and-mass-media), subsequently said that Yandex and the FSB had reached an agreement where the company would provide the required data without handing over the encryption keys.\nIn February 2021 Yandex admitted that one of their system administrators with access rights to Yandex's email service had enabled unauthorized access, leading to almost 5,000 Yandex email inboxes being compromised.\nOn January 25, 2023, a leaked archive with approx. 44 GB of Yandex services was shared on BreachForums via [BitTorrent](https://bliptext.com/articles/bittorrent).\nIn June 2023 Yandex was fined by the Moscow court for its repeated refusal to share user information with the Federal Security Service.\n\n# News and media\nIn April 2014, a [film](https://bliptext.com/articles/film) about the history of Yandex called Startup was released.\nOn 20 April 2020, as a result of the [COVID-19 pandemic in Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/covid-19-pandemic-in-russia), Yandex made its home coronavirus testing service free of charge for all residents of Moscow and its surroundings, extending it to other regions in the future.\nPreviously, it announced the launch of the service on 16 April.\nIn late March 2022, Yandex was the subject of a [Financial Times](https://bliptext.com/articles/financial-times) investigation that had been initiated by the [nonprofit organization](https://bliptext.com/articles/nonprofit-organization) Me2B Alliance as part of an application auditing campaign led by researcher Zach Edwards.\nEdwards and four expert researchers, including [Cher Scarlett](https://bliptext.com/articles/cher-scarlett), a former [Apple](https://bliptext.com/articles/apple-inc) security engineer, found that a [software development kit](https://bliptext.com/articles/software-development-kit) (SDK) called AppMetrica, a product of Yandex, was harvesting data from more than 52,000 applications such as a user's [device fingerprint](https://bliptext.com/articles/device-fingerprint) and [IP address](https://bliptext.com/articles/ip-address) and storing it in Russia on Yandex's servers, which they said due to Russian law, and the nature of SDKs, could be accessed by Russian authorities without their knowledge and used to identify them.\nYandex said of identification by the data collected: \"Although theoretically possible, in practice it is extremely hard to identify users based solely on such information collected.\"\nOf authority requests for data they said: \"Any requests that fail to comply with all relevant procedural and legal requirements are turned down.\"\nAccording to [Meduza](https://bliptext.com/articles/meduza) investigation published on 5 May 2022, since 2016 the top-5 [news](https://bliptext.com/articles/news) on the Yandex's main page are formed on the basis of a secret list of Russian [media](https://bliptext.com/articles/media-communication) approved by [Presidential Administration of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/presidential-administration-of-russia), which includes only pro-Kremlin [media](https://bliptext.com/articles/media-communication).\nYandex stated that the highest-ranked news on its main page is generated automatically through its algorithm.\nBecause of laws around news aggregators, only news received from registered media sources may appear on it.\nIn March 2022, Yandex began to look for ways to offload its news aggregator and blogging-recommendation platform as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine as well as the Kremlin's increased control of the media and freedom of expression.\nYandex sought to focus on something that \"under no circumstances can be politicized in any way. Under the current conditions, it is impossible to continue developing content and information services that affect a large number of people.\"\nIn September 2022, Yandex sold its media assets.\nThe company transferred News, Zen, and also the main page yandex.ru to VK Holding.\n\n# Statistics and finance indicators\nThe largest Russian Internet company in revenue.\nBy the number of processed requests is in the top world search engines.\nAccording to the analytical service \"Yandex. Radar\", the company's share in the Russian search market (including search on mobile devices) in the third quarter of 2020 averaged 59.3%.\nIn the fourth quarter of 2019, on Android devices in Russia, the share of search queries to Yandex was 54.3%.\nThe number of search queries increased by 7% compared to the same period in the fourth quarter of 2018.\nDynamics of the daily number of search queries Yandex Search\nAfter the announcement on July 13, 2017 that Yandex.Taxi and Uber were merging their businesses, the market capitalization of Yandex on the NASDAQ stock exchange grew to $10.73 billion, and the value of Yandex shares during day increased by 15.99% to 31.7 dollars per paper.\nAt the end of 2019, consolidated revenue increased by 37% compared to 2018, to 175.4 billion rubles ($2,833.2 million).\nRevenue increased by 39% compared to 2018 (excluding Yandex. Market).\nThe company's net profit amounted to 11.2 billion rubles ($180.9 million) and, compared to 2018, decreased by 75%.\nIn February 2020, Russian Forbes estimated the company’s value at $14.6 billion, placing it first in the list of the most valuable companies on the Runet.","wordIndex":1,"createdAt":"2025-05-13T03:48:29.747Z","user":{"id":"x4Fj2bcA1nMFyPw4tZDpMFfH6qR5XyR1","name":"m4ximumcheese","image":"https://cdn.discordapp.com/avatars/860939965240442950/97c01daeed2f7c679bfa9faab1d613f9.png"}}],"article":{"id":"0305436f-413f-4cfe-8506-aa1923bbf3bd","title":"Yandex","slug":"yandex","content":":::summary\n![Yandex LLC](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Yandex///main///office.jpg)\n**Name:** Yandex LLC \n**Native Name:** Яндекс \n**Logo Caption:** Logo used since 2021 \n**Image Caption:** Headquarters in Moscow \n**Type:** [Privately held company](https://bliptext.com/articles/privately-held-company) \n**Foundation:** 23 (Yandex search launched by CompTek) · 2007 (reincorporation of holding company in the Netherlands) \n**Location:** [Moscow](https://bliptext.com/articles/moscow), [Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/russia) \n**Founder:** Arkady Volozh · Arkady Borkovsky · Ilya Segalovich \n**Area Served:** Worldwide \n**Key People:** Artyom Savinovsky (CEO) \n**Num Employees:** 25 431 (2022) \n**Industry:** Internet · Search engine · Web mapping · Streaming media · Online shopping · Online food ordering \n**Products:** [List of Yandex products and services](https://bliptext.com/articles/list-of-yandex-products-and-services) \n**Homepage:** https://ya.ru \n**Owner:** Alexander Chachava (25%)
Pavel Prass (15%)
Lukoil (15%)
Alexander Ryazanov (10%)
Senior management (35%)
(It is speculated that the publicly identified owners are intermediaries for others) \n:::\n\n# \nYandeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeex (Тындекс) is a Russian [technology company](https://bliptext.com/articles/technology-company) that provides [Internet](https://bliptext.com/articles/internet)-related products and services including a [web browser](https://bliptext.com/articles/web-browser), [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine), [cloud computing](https://bliptext.com/articles/cloud-computing), [web mapping](https://bliptext.com/articles/web-mapping), [online food ordering](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-food-ordering), [streaming media](https://bliptext.com/articles/streaming-media), [online shopping](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-shopping), and a [ridesharing company](https://bliptext.com/articles/ridesharing-company).\n[Yandex Search](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-search) is the largest [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine) in Russia with an estimated 72% [market share](https://bliptext.com/articles/market-share) in Russia and a 2.8% [market share](https://bliptext.com/articles/market-share) worldwide.\n[Yandex Taxi](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-taxi) is the largest [ridesharing company](https://bliptext.com/articles/ridesharing-company) in Russia.\nYandex was founded by [Arkady Volozh](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-volozh) and launched its first product, a [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine), in 1997.\nDue to its significant media activities in Russia, the company has long faced pressure for control by the [government of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/government-of-russia).\nIn July 2024, in a transaction brought about by [international sanctions during the Russian invasion of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/international-sanctions-during-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine) and restrictions on foreign ownership, [Nebius Group](https://bliptext.com/articles/nebius-group), the Dutch holding company that owned Yandex, sold its Russian assets to a group of Russian investors for a discounted price of US$5.3 billion.\n\n# History\n[Arkady Volozh](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-volozh) and [Ilya Segalovich](https://bliptext.com/articles/ilya-segalovich) were friends from their school days in Kazakhstan in the 1980s.\nVolozh started developing algorithms to search in Russian texts and contacted Segalovich in 1990.\nThey worked together to develop search software, with the company name Arcadia.\nIn 1993, they invented the name \"[Yandex](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex)\" as an easy way to remember \"Yet Another iNDEXer\".\nThis is also a [bilingual pun](https://bliptext.com/articles/bilingual-pun) on \"index\" since \"Я\" (\"ya\") means \"I\" in Russian.\nOn September 23, 1997, the Yandex.ru search engine was launched and presented at the Softool exhibition in Moscow.\nArcadia became part of the software and computer part supply company, CompTek, and with Volozh as the CEO in 2000.\nIn 1998, Yandex launched [contextual advertisement](https://bliptext.com/articles/contextual-advertisement) on its search engine.\nIn 2000, Yandex was incorporated in Cyprus as a standalone company by Arkady Volozh.\nIn September 2005, it opened an office in Ukraine and launched www.yandex.ua.\nIn 2007, Yandex introduced a customized search engine for Ukrainian users; Yandex also opened its development center in Kyiv in May 2007.\nIn 2008, Yandex extended its presence in Ukraine by increasing bandwidth between Moscow data centers and UA-IX in Ukraine fivefold.\nIn 2009, all services of www.yandex.ua were localized for the Ukrainian market.\nIn 2010, Yandex launched its \"Poltava\" search engine algorithm for Ukrainian users, based on its [MatrixNet](https://bliptext.com/articles/matrixnet) technology.\nOn June 20, 2008, it announced the formation of Yandex Labs in [Silicon Valley](https://bliptext.com/articles/silicon-valley), to foster \"innovation in search and advertising technology\".\nOn 10 October 2017, Yandex introduced its voice assistant Alice.\nIn February 2018, the deal to merge Yandex.Taxi and Uber in Russia and five neighbouring countries closed.\nYandex's share in the new company, worth more than $3.8bn, was 59.3%.\nOn 9 October 2019, the company unveiled the second smart speaker of its own design - \"Yandex. Station Mini.\"\nIn 2020 Yandex published its internal operating principles.\nThere are more than 35 principles.\nThese include: \"We do not develop technology for military purposes\", \"We comply with the laws of each country that we operate in and try to constructively contribute to any proposed legislation that concerns technology or the market\", and \"The products and services that we make don't have any persuasion or political overtones.\"\nFor example, Yandex advertising services do not accept political ads.\nIn September 2020, Yandex spun off the direction of unmanned cars into a separate company, Yandex Self Driving Group.\nOn 10 March 2021, the company launched its own payment service Yandex Pay.\nIn the first half of September 2021, the IT company's servers were subjected to the largest DDoS attack in the history of the Runet.\nIn March 2022, executive director and deputy CEO Tigran Khudaverdyan resigned after EU sanctions.\nIn April, CEO [Elena Bunina](https://bliptext.com/articles/elena-bunina) resigned and moved to [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel).\nIn June, Volozh resigned.\nOn August 23, 2022, it was announced that Yandex is buying Delivery Club from [VK](https://bliptext.com/articles/vk-company) in exchange for [Yandex.Zen](https://bliptext.com/articles/zen-recommendation-system) and [Yandex.News](https://bliptext.com/articles/zen-news).\nIn September 2022, assets of Yandex and businessmen [Boris](https://bliptext.com/articles/boris-rotenberg-businessman) and [Arkady Rotenberg](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-rotenberg), who are close to President [Vladimir Putin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vladimir-putin), were [seized](https://bliptext.com/articles/seized) in [Finland](https://bliptext.com/articles/finland).\nIn December 2022 it became known that \"Yandex\" registered the company Beyond ML in Armenia.\nOn December 30, Arkady Volozh announced his departure from Yandex by publishing a letter to employees on the company's internal portal.\nOn May 17, 2023, Yandex launched its YaGPT neural network, analogous to the [ChatGPT](https://bliptext.com/articles/chatgpt) neural network.\nIn October 2023, Yandex Group's parent company, Yandex N.V. (Netherlands), received approval for internal restructuring from the government commission for controlling foreign investment in Russia.\nIn July 2024, Volozh announced his return to the parts of the business retained by Yandex N.V. (Netherlands) to be named [Nebius Group](https://bliptext.com/articles/nebius-group).\n(The EU lifted sanctions on Volozh in March 2024.) Volozh will be CEO of Nebius, according to Reuters.\n\n## Acquisitions\nIn March 2007, it acquired Russian [social networking service](https://bliptext.com/articles/social-networking-service) moikrug.ru.; on June 16, 2008, Yandex acquired SMILink, a Russian road traffic monitoring agency, to merge with Yandex.Maps services.\nIn September 2008, the company acquired the rights to the Punto Switcher software program, an automatic Russian to English keyboard layout switcher.\nIn September 2010, it invested in a $4.3 million financing round by [Face.com](https://bliptext.com/articles/face-com).\nThe company was acquired by [Facebook](https://bliptext.com/articles/facebook) in 2012.\nIn December 2010, the firm launched Yandex.Start to find startups and work with them systematically, and purchased WebVisor's behavior analysis technology in December 2010.\nIn September 2011, it invested in [Blekko](https://bliptext.com/articles/blekko) as part of a $30 million financing round.\nIn November 2011, it acquired software developer [SPB Software](https://bliptext.com/articles/spb-software) for $38 million.\nIn June 2012, it acquired a 25% stake in Seismotech, for $1 million.\nOn January 26, 2011, it introduced premium placement opportunity in its Business directory in which advertisers' local small businesses are highlighted.\nOn January 27, 2011, the company acquired single sign-in service Loginza.\nIn August 2011, Yandex acquired The Tweeted Times, a news delivery startup.\nIn September 2011, it launched a search engine and a range of other services in Turkey, opening an office in Istanbul.\nIn October 2013, the company acquired [KinoPoisk](https://bliptext.com/articles/kinopoisk), the biggest Russian movie search engine.\nIn February 2014, Yandex invested several million dollars in MultiShip.\nIn March 2014, it acquired [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel)i [geolocation](https://bliptext.com/articles/geolocation) startup [KitLocate](https://bliptext.com/articles/kitlocate) and opened a [research and development](https://bliptext.com/articles/research-and-development) (R&D) office in [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel).\nIn June 2014, it acquired Auto.ru, an [online marketplace](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-marketplace) and [classified advertising](https://bliptext.com/articles/classified-advertising) website for automobiles, for $175 million.\nIn December 2015, it acquired [Internet security](https://bliptext.com/articles/internet-security) company Agnitum.\nOn June 6, 2017, the company invested in a $5 million financing round by [Doc+](https://bliptext.com/articles/doc).\nIn December 2017, it acquired [food delivery](https://bliptext.com/articles/food-delivery) Foodfox.\nOn February 7, 2018, [Uber](https://bliptext.com/articles/uber) and Yandex NV merged their businesses in Russia, [Kazakhstan](https://bliptext.com/articles/kazakhstan), [Azerbaijan](https://bliptext.com/articles/azerbaijan), [Armenia](https://bliptext.com/articles/armenia), [Belarus](https://bliptext.com/articles/belarus) and [Georgia](https://bliptext.com/articles/georgia-country).\nUber invested $225 million and owns 36.6% stake in the venture while Yandex invested $100 million and owns a 59.3% stake.\nIn May 2018, [Sberbank](https://bliptext.com/articles/sberbank) and Yandex completed a joint venture deal to develop a B2C eCommerce ecosystem.\nIn October 2018, Yandex acquired Edadil (Russian: Едадил, lit. \"grocery deals\"), a deal aggregator service.\nIn June 2021, Yandex, [VTB Bank](https://bliptext.com/articles/vtb-bank), LANIT Group and computer hardware producer Gigabyte founded a joint venture to start producing servers in Russia in 2022.\nIn October 2021, construction of a new plant in [Ryazan Oblast](https://bliptext.com/articles/ryazan-oblast) was launched with 1 billion roubles during the first stage of investments.\nThe new plant will produce servers, data storage systems, gateways and smart equipment under \"Openyard\" brand.\nHowever, in June 2023 Yandex announced it was looking for ways to exit the joint venture.\nIn January 2022, Yandex acquired \"eLama\", digital advertising platform, waiting for the approval from [Federal Antimonopoly Service](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-antimonopoly-service).\nThat same month Yandex has also bought \"BandLink\" music service.\n\n## Finances\nThe company became profitable in November 2002.\nIn 2004, Yandex sales increased to $17 million, up 1000% in 2 years.\nThe net income of the company in 2004 was $7 million.\nIn June 2006, the weekly revenue of [Yandex.Direct](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-direct) context ads system exceeded $1 million.\nThe company's accounting has been audited by [Deloitte](https://bliptext.com/articles/deloitte) since 1999.\nBetween 2004 and 2006, Tiger Technologies obtained an 11% ownership stake.\nOn May 24, 2011, it raised $1.3 billion in an [initial public offering](https://bliptext.com/articles/initial-public-offering) on [NASDAQ](https://bliptext.com/articles/nasdaq), the biggest [initial public offering](https://bliptext.com/articles/initial-public-offering) for a [dot-com company](https://bliptext.com/articles/dot-com-company) since [Google](https://bliptext.com/articles/google)'s offering in 2004.\nAmong the largest investors were [Baring Vostok Capital Partners](https://bliptext.com/articles/baring-vostok-capital-partners), which owned a 30% stake, and Tiger Technologies, which owned a 15% stake.\nIn 2013, Yandex became the largest media property in Russia by revenue.\nIn March 2022, Yandex warned shareholders about the risk of default if holders of Yandex N.V. wished to use their right to pay them off early.\nBefore that, the trading of Yandex securities on the NASDAQ was suspended due to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.\nIn September 2022, Yandex bought back 98.7% of issued Yandex N.V convertible bonds.\nIn April 2022, TechCrunch reported that Yandex signed an agreement with VK holding with regard to the sale of News and Zen media services together with the main page yandex.ru\nIn September 2022, News, Zen, and yandex.ru were transferred to a new owner.\nAt the same time ya.ru became Yandex's new main page as well as the key entry point for Search, Mail, and other non-media services.\nIn November 2022, the board of directors of Yandex N.V. announced a possible restructuring of the company.\nThe main part of the business would be placed into a separate group of companies that will keep the Yandex brand, which may be registered in Russia.\nThe international parts of some businesses will be placed into separate companies under the control of Dutch Yandex N.V., which will eventually leave the shareholders of the Russian Yandex Group.\nIn March 2023, the NASDAQ exchange announced its intention to delist Yandex and a number of other companies doing business in Russia.\nYandex appealed this decision.\nNASDAQ granted the appeal, given the company's plans to separate the Russian and foreign businesses.\nThe suspension of trading remains in effect.\nIn May 2023, Yandex announced that it received applications from potential investors for the purchase of an economic share in the company.\nEconomic investors will not be able to influence the company's activities.\nVoting control and management will remain with the top management of Yandex.\nAmong the main applicants were private industrial investors [Vagit Alekperov](https://bliptext.com/articles/vagit-alekperov) (Lukoil Founder) and [Vladimir Potanin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vladimir-potanin).\n\n# Offices\nIn 2008, Yandex opened a technology and business development unit called Yandex Labs in [Silicon Valley](https://bliptext.com/articles/silicon-valley).\nIn 2011, the [Istanbul](https://bliptext.com/articles/istanbul) office was launched together with the company's web portal in Turkey in 2011.\nIn 2012, the company opened its first European office in [Lucerne](https://bliptext.com/articles/lucerne) to serve advertising clients in the EU.\nIts first [research and development](https://bliptext.com/articles/research-and-development) office in Europe started operating in [Berlin](https://bliptext.com/articles/berlin) in 2014.\nIn 2015, the company's [Shanghai](https://bliptext.com/articles/shanghai) office was launched to facilitate work with Chinese companies operating on the Russian language market.\nAs of 2018 it had more than 30 offices worldwide.\nIn December 2021 a new location in Prague was added to accommodate the company's rapidly expanding crowdsourcing, routing, cloud computing, ridesharing and weather forecasting teams.\nAs of 2021, Yandex had offices in 12 countries.\n\n# Products and services\nIn 2001, the company launched the [Yandex.Direct](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-direct) [online advertising](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-advertising) network.\nIn January 2009, [Mozilla Firefox 3.5](https://bliptext.com/articles/mozilla-firefox-3-5) replaced Google with Yandex as the default search provider for Russian-language builds.\nIn August 2009, the company introduced a player of free legal music in its search results.\nIn September 2010, Yandex launched [Yandex Music](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-music), a music streaming service, with a catalogue of 800,000 tracks from 58,000 performers.\nOn 19 May 2010, it launched an English-only web search engine.\nIn March 2013, the company added an English [user interface](https://bliptext.com/articles/user-interface) to its translation [mobile app](https://bliptext.com/articles/mobile-app).\nIn July 2013, [Mail.Ru](https://bliptext.com/articles/vk-company) started placing Yandex Direct ads on its search result pages.\nOn 10 October 2017, the company introduced its [intelligent personal assistant](https://bliptext.com/articles/intelligent-personal-assistant), [Alisa](https://bliptext.com/articles/alisa-virtual-assistant) (Alice), for [Android](https://bliptext.com/articles/android-operating-system), [iOS](https://bliptext.com/articles/ios), and [Microsoft Windows](https://bliptext.com/articles/microsoft-windows).\nOn 28 April 2022, Yandex announced that it had sold its news and blogging products to VK.\nIn 2022, following the [Russian invasion of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/russian-invasion-of-ukraine), the [Bureau of Investigative Journalism](https://bliptext.com/articles/bureau-of-investigative-journalism) said that Yandex-delivered ads promoted misinformation about the war in Ukraine which were produced by more than half a dozen Russian-language news sites.\nMany of the articles displayed in Yandex's news aggregators were also from Russian state-owned and state-sponsored sources while the top search results about the war would sometimes prominently feature pro-war websites.\n\n## Search\n\n## Games\n**Yandex.Games** is an Internet gaming platform made by Yandex, which is available on both browser and mobile.\nAs of 2022, the number of games included in the catalog exceeded 10,000, with more than 11 million players a month.\nThe platform provides two types of income: advertising and in-app purchases.\nThere is also an in-game currency called \"Yans\".\nDevelopers add their games to the catalog independently and edit them in the future.\nAll games are [moderated](https://bliptext.com/articles/moderation).\nMandatory requirements include integration with the Yandex.Games SDK, support for [HTTPS](https://bliptext.com/articles/https) and offline Service Worker mode.\nGame developers follow the updates of the platform in the blog, and content is provided by companies all over the world (e.g. Dutch media platform Azerion ).\nIn addition to a wide system of user ratings and reviews, the service uses complex algorithms to create personalized collections: games that have already been played, or those that are likely to be played.\n\n## Technologies\nOn 16 February 2018, the company showed off the first tests of its [autonomous cars](https://bliptext.com/articles/autonomous-car) in Moscow.\nOn 5 December 2018, Yandex announced the release of their first smartphone, the Yandex.Phone.\nIn May 2023, Yandex implemented the YandexGPT generative neural network in the virtual assistant [Alice](https://bliptext.com/articles/alice-virtual-assistant).\nBetween 2021 and 2023, Yandex introduced automatic voice-over translation for any YouTube video in English, Chinese, French, Spanish and German.\nOn 7 June 2023, the company launched a test of its first self-driving taxi in Moscow.\n\n## Facial recognition on cameras\nThe Kremlin planned in 2024 to use NTechLab's software for a secret center that will collect and analyze CCTV footage from across Russia.\nThe aim of the project is to 'identify threats in a timely manner' and 'monitor individuals for destructive and/or disloyal behavior'.\n\n## Open source\nIn 2009, Yandex began development on its project [MatrixNet](https://bliptext.com/articles/matrixnet).\nIt was a unique patented algorithm for the building of machine learning models, which used one of the original gradient boosting schemes.\nIn July 2017, the [CatBoost](https://bliptext.com/articles/catboost) library was released to the public.\nIt implements the Matrixnet algorithm for the building of machine learning models.\nAt the time of release, the technology was already in use as part of a collaborative project with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to analyze the results of conducted particle experiments CatBoost is used by foreign companies.\nFor example: [JetBrains](https://bliptext.com/articles/jetbrains) uses it for code completion, [CloudFlare](https://bliptext.com/articles/cloudflare) for bot detection, and [Careem](https://bliptext.com/articles/careem) for trip-distance determination.\nIn 2012, Yandex began research and development within the field of natural-speech processing.\nAnd in October 2023, the company introduced Yandex SpeechKit.\nIt is a speech-recognition and synthesis technology as well as a public API for speech recognition that Android and iOS developers can use.\nIn 2022, the company published the source code for the [YDB](https://bliptext.com/articles/ydb-database) database management system.\nIt is used in its own voice assistant Alice as well as in Yandex.Go and [Yandex Market](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-market) services.\nIn 2023, Yandex published the source code for YTsaurus.\nIt is a platform for work with big data.\n\n## Investments\nYandex is an [investor](https://bliptext.com/articles/investor) in several foreign companies.\nExamples include: Vizi Labs, [Face.com](https://bliptext.com/articles/face-com), [Blekko](https://bliptext.com/articles/blekko), and SalesPredict.\n\n# Security\nOn June 1, 2017, Yandex closed its offices in [Kyiv](https://bliptext.com/articles/kyiv) and [Odesa](https://bliptext.com/articles/odesa), Ukraine after the [Security Service of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/security-service-of-ukraine) raided the offices and accused the company of illegally collecting Ukrainian users' data and sending it to Russian security agencies.\nThe firm denied any wrongdoing.\nIn May 2017, all Yandex services were banned in Ukraine by Presidential Decree No. 133/2017.\nIn October and November 2018, Yandex was targeted in a cyberattack using the [Regin](https://bliptext.com/articles/regin-malware) malware, aimed at stealing technical information from its research and development unit on how users were authenticated.\nAn investigation by [Kaspersky Lab](https://bliptext.com/articles/kaspersky-lab) attributed the hacks to [Five Eyes](https://bliptext.com/articles/five-eyes) intelligence agencies.\nIn June 2019, [RBC](https://bliptext.com/articles/rbc-group) News reported that Yandex had refused a request by the Russian [Federal Security Service](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-security-service) (FSB) under the [Yarovaya law](https://bliptext.com/articles/yarovaya-law) to surrender encryption keys that could decrypt the private data of its e-mail service and cloud storage users.\nThe company argued that it was impossible to comply with the relevant law without compromising its users' privacy.\n[Maxim Akimov](https://bliptext.com/articles/maxim-akimov), [Deputy Prime Minister of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/deputy-prime-minister-of-russia), said that the government would take action to relieve FSB pressure on the company.\n[Alexander Zharov](https://bliptext.com/articles/alexander-zharov), head of the [Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-service-for-supervision-of-communications-information-technology-and-mass-media), subsequently said that Yandex and the FSB had reached an agreement where the company would provide the required data without handing over the encryption keys.\nIn February 2021 Yandex admitted that one of their system administrators with access rights to Yandex's email service had enabled unauthorized access, leading to almost 5,000 Yandex email inboxes being compromised.\nOn January 25, 2023, a leaked archive with approx. 44 GB of Yandex services was shared on BreachForums via [BitTorrent](https://bliptext.com/articles/bittorrent).\nIn June 2023 Yandex was fined by the Moscow court for its repeated refusal to share user information with the Federal Security Service.\n\n# News and media\nIn April 2014, a [film](https://bliptext.com/articles/film) about the history of Yandex called Startup was released.\nOn 20 April 2020, as a result of the [COVID-19 pandemic in Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/covid-19-pandemic-in-russia), Yandex made its home coronavirus testing service free of charge for all residents of Moscow and its surroundings, extending it to other regions in the future.\nPreviously, it announced the launch of the service on 16 April.\nIn late March 2022, Yandex was the subject of a [Financial Times](https://bliptext.com/articles/financial-times) investigation that had been initiated by the [nonprofit organization](https://bliptext.com/articles/nonprofit-organization) Me2B Alliance as part of an application auditing campaign led by researcher Zach Edwards.\nEdwards and four expert researchers, including [Cher Scarlett](https://bliptext.com/articles/cher-scarlett), a former [Apple](https://bliptext.com/articles/apple-inc) security engineer, found that a [software development kit](https://bliptext.com/articles/software-development-kit) (SDK) called AppMetrica, a product of Yandex, was harvesting data from more than 52,000 applications such as a user's [device fingerprint](https://bliptext.com/articles/device-fingerprint) and [IP address](https://bliptext.com/articles/ip-address) and storing it in Russia on Yandex's servers, which they said due to Russian law, and the nature of SDKs, could be accessed by Russian authorities without their knowledge and used to identify them.\nYandex said of identification by the data collected: \"Although theoretically possible, in practice it is extremely hard to identify users based solely on such information collected.\"\nOf authority requests for data they said: \"Any requests that fail to comply with all relevant procedural and legal requirements are turned down.\"\nAccording to [Meduza](https://bliptext.com/articles/meduza) investigation published on 5 May 2022, since 2016 the top-5 [news](https://bliptext.com/articles/news) on the Yandex's main page are formed on the basis of a secret list of Russian [media](https://bliptext.com/articles/media-communication) approved by [Presidential Administration of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/presidential-administration-of-russia), which includes only pro-Kremlin [media](https://bliptext.com/articles/media-communication).\nYandex stated that the highest-ranked news on its main page is generated automatically through its algorithm.\nBecause of laws around news aggregators, only news received from registered media sources may appear on it.\nIn March 2022, Yandex began to look for ways to offload its news aggregator and blogging-recommendation platform as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine as well as the Kremlin's increased control of the media and freedom of expression.\nYandex sought to focus on something that \"under no circumstances can be politicized in any way. Under the current conditions, it is impossible to continue developing content and information services that affect a large number of people.\"\nIn September 2022, Yandex sold its media assets.\nThe company transferred News, Zen, and also the main page yandex.ru to VK Holding.\n\n# Statistics and finance indicators\nThe largest Russian Internet company in revenue.\nBy the number of processed requests is in the top world search engines.\nAccording to the analytical service \"Yandex. Radar\", the company's share in the Russian search market (including search on mobile devices) in the third quarter of 2020 averaged 59.3%.\nIn the fourth quarter of 2019, on Android devices in Russia, the share of search queries to Yandex was 54.3%.\nThe number of search queries increased by 7% compared to the same period in the fourth quarter of 2018.\nDynamics of the daily number of search queries Yandex Search\nAfter the announcement on July 13, 2017 that Yandex.Taxi and Uber were merging their businesses, the market capitalization of Yandex on the NASDAQ stock exchange grew to $10.73 billion, and the value of Yandex shares during day increased by 15.99% to 31.7 dollars per paper.\nAt the end of 2019, consolidated revenue increased by 37% compared to 2018, to 175.4 billion rubles ($2,833.2 million).\nRevenue increased by 39% compared to 2018 (excluding Yandex. Market).\nThe company's net profit amounted to 11.2 billion rubles ($180.9 million) and, compared to 2018, decreased by 75%.\nIn February 2020, Russian Forbes estimated the company’s value at $14.6 billion, placing it first in the list of the most valuable companies on the Runet.","current_revision":"cad60609-aa41-46af-bf41-b99e65d066f9","created_by":"kACnuQmH5k9Nr5VNVEpVeg7XpvUmMctD","created_at":"2025-01-26T06:51:34.952Z","updated_at":"2026-03-28T11:33:54.469Z","search_vector":"'yandex':1","search_content":" \n \n**Name:** Yandex LLC \n**Native Name:** Яндекс \n**Logo Caption:** Logo used since 2021 \n**Image Caption:** Headquarters in Moscow \n**Type:** [Privately held company](https://bliptext.com/articles/privately-held-company) \n**Foundation:** 23 (Yandex search launched by CompTek) · 2007 (reincorporation of holding company in the Netherlands) \n**Location:** [Moscow](https://bliptext.com/articles/moscow), [Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/russia) \n**Founder:** Arkady Volozh · Arkady Borkovsky · Ilya Segalovich \n**Area Served:** Worldwide \n**Key People:** Artyom Savinovsky (CEO) \n**Num Employees:** 25 431 (2022) \n**Industry:** Internet · Search engine · Web mapping · Streaming media · Online shopping · Online food ordering \n**Products:** [List of Yandex products and services](https://bliptext.com/articles/list-of-yandex-products-and-services) \n**Homepage:** https://ya.ru \n**Owner:** Alexander Chachava (25%) Pavel Prass (15%) Lukoil (15%) Alexander Ryazanov (10%) Senior management (35%) (It is speculated that the publicly identified owners are intermediaries for others) \n \n\n# \n**Yandex LLC** (Яндекс) is a Russian [technology company](https://bliptext.com/articles/technology-company) that provides [Internet](https://bliptext.com/articles/internet)-related products and services including a [web browser](https://bliptext.com/articles/web-browser), [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine), [cloud computing](https://bliptext.com/articles/cloud-computing), [web mapping](https://bliptext.com/articles/web-mapping), [online food ordering](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-food-ordering), [streaming media](https://bliptext.com/articles/streaming-media), [online shopping](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-shopping), and a [ridesharing company](https://bliptext.com/articles/ridesharing-company).\n[Yandex Search](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-search) is the largest [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine) in Russia with an estimated 72% [[market share](https://bliptext.com/articles/market-share)](https://bliptext.com/articles/market-share) in Russia and a 2.8% [[market share](https://bliptext.com/articles/market-share)](https://bliptext.com/articles/market-share) worldwide.\n[Yandex Taxi](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-taxi) is the largest [ridesharing company](https://bliptext.com/articles/ridesharing-company) in Russia.\nYandex was founded by [Arkady Volozh](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-volozh) and launched its first product, a [search engine](https://bliptext.com/articles/search-engine), in 1997.\nDue to its significant media activities in Russia, the company has long faced pressure for control by the [government of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/government-of-russia).\nIn July 2024, in a transaction brought about by [international sanctions during the Russian invasion of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/international-sanctions-during-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine) and restrictions on foreign ownership, [Nebius Group](https://bliptext.com/articles/nebius-group), the Dutch holding company that owned Yandex, sold its Russian assets to a group of Russian investors for a discounted price of US$5.3 billion.\n\n# History\n[Arkady Volozh](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-volozh) and [Ilya Segalovich](https://bliptext.com/articles/ilya-segalovich) were friends from their school days in Kazakhstan in the 1980s.\nVolozh started developing algorithms to search in Russian texts and contacted Segalovich in 1990.\nThey worked together to develop search software, with the company name Arcadia.\nIn 1993, they invented the name \"[Yandex](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex)\" as an easy way to remember \"Yet Another iNDEXer\".\nThis is also a [bilingual pun](https://bliptext.com/articles/bilingual-pun) on \"index\" since \"Я\" (\"ya\") means \"I\" in Russian.\nOn September 23, 1997, the Yandex.ru search engine was launched and presented at the Softool exhibition in Moscow.\nArcadia became part of the software and computer part supply company, CompTek, and with Volozh as the CEO in 2000.\nIn 1998, Yandex launched [contextual advertisement](https://bliptext.com/articles/contextual-advertisement) on its search engine.\nIn 2000, Yandex was incorporated in Cyprus as a standalone company by Arkady Volozh.\nIn September 2005, it opened an office in Ukraine and launched www.yandex.ua.\nIn 2007, Yandex introduced a customized search engine for Ukrainian users; Yandex also opened its development center in Kyiv in May 2007.\nIn 2008, Yandex extended its presence in Ukraine by increasing bandwidth between Moscow data centers and UA-IX in Ukraine fivefold.\nIn 2009, all services of www.yandex.ua were localized for the Ukrainian market.\nIn 2010, Yandex launched its \"Poltava\" search engine algorithm for Ukrainian users, based on its [MatrixNet](https://bliptext.com/articles/matrixnet) technology.\nOn June 20, 2008, it announced the formation of Yandex Labs in [Silicon Valley](https://bliptext.com/articles/silicon-valley), to foster \"innovation in search and advertising technology\".\nOn 10 October 2017, Yandex introduced its voice assistant Alice.\nIn February 2018, the deal to merge Yandex.Taxi and Uber in Russia and five neighbouring countries closed.\nYandex's share in the new company, worth more than $3.8bn, was 59.3%.\nOn 9 October 2019, the company unveiled the second smart speaker of its own design - \"Yandex. Station Mini.\"\nIn 2020 Yandex published its internal operating principles.\nThere are more than 35 principles.\nThese include: \"We do not develop technology for military purposes\", \"We comply with the laws of each country that we operate in and try to constructively contribute to any proposed legislation that concerns technology or the market\", and \"The products and services that we make don't have any persuasion or political overtones.\"\nFor example, Yandex advertising services do not accept political ads.\nIn September 2020, Yandex spun off the direction of unmanned cars into a separate company, Yandex Self Driving Group.\nOn 10 March 2021, the company launched its own payment service Yandex Pay.\nIn the first half of September 2021, the IT company's servers were subjected to the largest DDoS attack in the history of the Runet.\nIn March 2022, executive director and deputy CEO Tigran Khudaverdyan resigned after EU sanctions.\nIn April, CEO [Elena Bunina](https://bliptext.com/articles/elena-bunina) resigned and moved to [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel).\nIn June, Volozh resigned.\nOn August 23, 2022, it was announced that Yandex is buying Delivery Club from [VK](https://bliptext.com/articles/vk-company) in exchange for [Yandex.Zen](https://bliptext.com/articles/zen-recommendation-system) and [Yandex.News](https://bliptext.com/articles/zen-news).\nIn September 2022, assets of Yandex and businessmen [Boris](https://bliptext.com/articles/boris-rotenberg-businessman) and [Arkady Rotenberg](https://bliptext.com/articles/arkady-rotenberg), who are close to President [Vladimir Putin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vladimir-putin), were [seized](https://bliptext.com/articles/seized) in [Finland](https://bliptext.com/articles/finland).\nIn December 2022 it became known that \"Yandex\" registered the company Beyond ML in Armenia.\nOn December 30, Arkady Volozh announced his departure from Yandex by publishing a letter to employees on the company's internal portal.\nOn May 17, 2023, Yandex launched its YaGPT neural network, analogous to the [ChatGPT](https://bliptext.com/articles/chatgpt) neural network.\nIn October 2023, Yandex Group's parent company, Yandex N.V. (Netherlands), received approval for internal restructuring from the government commission for controlling foreign investment in Russia.\nIn July 2024, Volozh announced his return to the parts of the business retained by Yandex N.V. (Netherlands) to be named [Nebius Group](https://bliptext.com/articles/nebius-group).\n(The EU lifted sanctions on Volozh in March 2024.) Volozh will be CEO of Nebius, according to Reuters.\n\n## Acquisitions\nIn March 2007, it acquired Russian [social networking service](https://bliptext.com/articles/social-networking-service) moikrug.ru.; on June 16, 2008, Yandex acquired SMILink, a Russian road traffic monitoring agency, to merge with Yandex.Maps services.\nIn September 2008, the company acquired the rights to the Punto Switcher software program, an automatic Russian to English keyboard layout switcher.\nIn September 2010, it invested in a $4.3 million financing round by [Face.com](https://bliptext.com/articles/face-com).\nThe company was acquired by [Facebook](https://bliptext.com/articles/facebook) in 2012.\nIn December 2010, the firm launched Yandex.Start to find startups and work with them systematically, and purchased WebVisor's behavior analysis technology in December 2010.\nIn September 2011, it invested in [Blekko](https://bliptext.com/articles/blekko) as part of a $30 million financing round.\nIn November 2011, it acquired software developer [SPB Software](https://bliptext.com/articles/spb-software) for $38 million.\nIn June 2012, it acquired a 25% stake in Seismotech, for $1 million.\nOn January 26, 2011, it introduced premium placement opportunity in its Business directory in which advertisers' local small businesses are highlighted.\nOn January 27, 2011, the company acquired single sign-in service Loginza.\nIn August 2011, Yandex acquired The Tweeted Times, a news delivery startup.\nIn September 2011, it launched a search engine and a range of other services in Turkey, opening an office in Istanbul.\nIn October 2013, the company acquired [KinoPoisk](https://bliptext.com/articles/kinopoisk), the biggest Russian movie search engine.\nIn February 2014, Yandex invested several million dollars in MultiShip.\nIn March 2014, it acquired [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel)i [geolocation](https://bliptext.com/articles/geolocation) startup [KitLocate](https://bliptext.com/articles/kitlocate) and opened a [research and development](https://bliptext.com/articles/research-and-development) (R&D) office in [Israel](https://bliptext.com/articles/israel).\nIn June 2014, it acquired Auto.ru, an [online marketplace](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-marketplace) and [classified advertising](https://bliptext.com/articles/classified-advertising) website for automobiles, for $175 million.\nIn December 2015, it acquired [Internet security](https://bliptext.com/articles/internet-security) company Agnitum.\nOn June 6, 2017, the company invested in a $5 million financing round by [Doc+](https://bliptext.com/articles/doc).\nIn December 2017, it acquired [food delivery](https://bliptext.com/articles/food-delivery) Foodfox.\nOn February 7, 2018, [Uber](https://bliptext.com/articles/uber) and Yandex NV merged their businesses in Russia, [Kazakhstan](https://bliptext.com/articles/kazakhstan), [Azerbaijan](https://bliptext.com/articles/azerbaijan), [Armenia](https://bliptext.com/articles/armenia), [Belarus](https://bliptext.com/articles/belarus) and [Georgia](https://bliptext.com/articles/georgia-country).\nUber invested $225 million and owns 36.6% stake in the venture while Yandex invested $100 million and owns a 59.3% stake.\nIn May 2018, [Sberbank](https://bliptext.com/articles/sberbank) and Yandex completed a joint venture deal to develop a B2C eCommerce ecosystem.\nIn October 2018, Yandex acquired Edadil (Russian: Едадил, lit. \"grocery deals\"), a deal aggregator service.\nIn June 2021, Yandex, [VTB Bank](https://bliptext.com/articles/vtb-bank), LANIT Group and computer hardware producer Gigabyte founded a joint venture to start producing servers in Russia in 2022.\nIn October 2021, construction of a new plant in [Ryazan Oblast](https://bliptext.com/articles/ryazan-oblast) was launched with 1 billion roubles during the first stage of investments.\nThe new plant will produce servers, data storage systems, gateways and smart equipment under \"Openyard\" brand.\nHowever, in June 2023 Yandex announced it was looking for ways to exit the joint venture.\nIn January 2022, Yandex acquired \"eLama\", digital advertising platform, waiting for the approval from [Federal Antimonopoly Service](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-antimonopoly-service).\nThat same month Yandex has also bought \"BandLink\" music service.\n\n## Finances\nThe company became profitable in November 2002.\nIn 2004, Yandex sales increased to $17 million, up 1000% in 2 years.\nThe net income of the company in 2004 was $7 million.\nIn June 2006, the weekly revenue of [Yandex.Direct](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-direct) context ads system exceeded $1 million.\nThe company's accounting has been audited by [Deloitte](https://bliptext.com/articles/deloitte) since 1999.\nBetween 2004 and 2006, Tiger Technologies obtained an 11% ownership stake.\nOn May 24, 2011, it raised $1.3 billion in an [initial public offering](https://bliptext.com/articles/initial-public-offering) on [NASDAQ](https://bliptext.com/articles/nasdaq), the biggest [initial public offering](https://bliptext.com/articles/initial-public-offering) for a [dot-com company](https://bliptext.com/articles/dot-com-company) since [Google](https://bliptext.com/articles/google)'s offering in 2004.\nAmong the largest investors were [Baring Vostok Capital Partners](https://bliptext.com/articles/baring-vostok-capital-partners), which owned a 30% stake, and Tiger Technologies, which owned a 15% stake.\nIn 2013, Yandex became the largest media property in Russia by revenue.\nIn March 2022, Yandex warned shareholders about the risk of default if holders of Yandex N.V. wished to use their right to pay them off early.\nBefore that, the trading of Yandex securities on the NASDAQ was suspended due to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.\nIn September 2022, Yandex bought back 98.7% of issued Yandex N.V convertible bonds.\nIn April 2022, TechCrunch reported that Yandex signed an agreement with VK holding with regard to the sale of News and Zen media services together with the main page yandex.ru\nIn September 2022, News, Zen, and yandex.ru were transferred to a new owner.\nAt the same time ya.ru became Yandex's new main page as well as the key entry point for Search, Mail, and other non-media services.\nIn November 2022, the board of directors of Yandex N.V. announced a possible restructuring of the company.\nThe main part of the business would be placed into a separate group of companies that will keep the Yandex brand, which may be registered in Russia.\nThe international parts of some businesses will be placed into separate companies under the control of Dutch Yandex N.V., which will eventually leave the shareholders of the Russian Yandex Group.\nIn March 2023, the NASDAQ exchange announced its intention to delist Yandex and a number of other companies doing business in Russia.\nYandex appealed this decision.\nNASDAQ granted the appeal, given the company's plans to separate the Russian and foreign businesses.\nThe suspension of trading remains in effect.\nIn May 2023, Yandex announced that it received applications from potential investors for the purchase of an economic share in the company.\nEconomic investors will not be able to influence the company's activities.\nVoting control and management will remain with the top management of Yandex.\nAmong the main applicants were private industrial investors [Vagit Alekperov](https://bliptext.com/articles/vagit-alekperov) (Lukoil Founder) and [Vladimir Potanin](https://bliptext.com/articles/vladimir-potanin).\n\n# Offices\nIn 2008, Yandex opened a technology and business development unit called Yandex Labs in [Silicon Valley](https://bliptext.com/articles/silicon-valley).\nIn 2011, the [Istanbul](https://bliptext.com/articles/istanbul) office was launched together with the company's web portal in Turkey in 2011.\nIn 2012, the company opened its first European office in [Lucerne](https://bliptext.com/articles/lucerne) to serve advertising clients in the EU.\nIts first [research and development](https://bliptext.com/articles/research-and-development) office in Europe started operating in [Berlin](https://bliptext.com/articles/berlin) in 2014.\nIn 2015, the company's [Shanghai](https://bliptext.com/articles/shanghai) office was launched to facilitate work with Chinese companies operating on the Russian language market.\nAs of 2018 it had more than 30 offices worldwide.\nIn December 2021 a new location in Prague was added to accommodate the company's rapidly expanding crowdsourcing, routing, cloud computing, ridesharing and weather forecasting teams.\nAs of 2021, Yandex had offices in 12 countries.\n\n# Products and services\nIn 2001, the company launched the [Yandex.Direct](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-direct) [online advertising](https://bliptext.com/articles/online-advertising) network.\nIn January 2009, [Mozilla Firefox 3.5](https://bliptext.com/articles/mozilla-firefox-3-5) replaced Google with Yandex as the default search provider for Russian-language builds.\nIn August 2009, the company introduced a player of free legal music in its search results.\nIn September 2010, Yandex launched [Yandex Music](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-music), a music streaming service, with a catalogue of 800,000 tracks from 58,000 performers.\nOn 19 May 2010, it launched an English-only web search engine.\nIn March 2013, the company added an English [user interface](https://bliptext.com/articles/user-interface) to its translation [mobile app](https://bliptext.com/articles/mobile-app).\nIn July 2013, [Mail.Ru](https://bliptext.com/articles/vk-company) started placing Yandex Direct ads on its search result pages.\nOn 10 October 2017, the company introduced its [intelligent personal assistant](https://bliptext.com/articles/intelligent-personal-assistant), [Alisa](https://bliptext.com/articles/alisa-virtual-assistant) (Alice), for [Android](https://bliptext.com/articles/android-operating-system), [iOS](https://bliptext.com/articles/ios), and [Microsoft Windows](https://bliptext.com/articles/microsoft-windows).\nOn 28 April 2022, Yandex announced that it had sold its news and blogging products to VK.\nIn 2022, following the [Russian invasion of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/russian-invasion-of-ukraine), the [Bureau of Investigative Journalism](https://bliptext.com/articles/bureau-of-investigative-journalism) said that Yandex-delivered ads promoted misinformation about the war in Ukraine which were produced by more than half a dozen Russian-language news sites.\nMany of the articles displayed in Yandex's news aggregators were also from Russian state-owned and state-sponsored sources while the top search results about the war would sometimes prominently feature pro-war websites.\n\n## Search\n\n## Games\n**Yandex.Games** is an Internet gaming platform made by Yandex, which is available on both browser and mobile.\nAs of 2022, the number of games included in the catalog exceeded 10,000, with more than 11 million players a month.\nThe platform provides two types of income: advertising and in-app purchases.\nThere is also an in-game currency called \"Yans\".\nDevelopers add their games to the catalog independently and edit them in the future.\nAll games are [moderated](https://bliptext.com/articles/moderation).\nMandatory requirements include integration with the Yandex.Games SDK, support for [HTTPS](https://bliptext.com/articles/https) and offline Service Worker mode.\nGame developers follow the updates of the platform in the blog, and content is provided by companies all over the world (e.g. Dutch media platform Azerion ).\nIn addition to a wide system of user ratings and reviews, the service uses complex algorithms to create personalized collections: games that have already been played, or those that are likely to be played.\n\n## Technologies\nOn 16 February 2018, the company showed off the first tests of its [autonomous cars](https://bliptext.com/articles/autonomous-car) in Moscow.\nOn 5 December 2018, Yandex announced the release of their first smartphone, the Yandex.Phone.\nIn May 2023, Yandex implemented the YandexGPT generative neural network in the virtual assistant [Alice](https://bliptext.com/articles/alice-virtual-assistant).\nBetween 2021 and 2023, Yandex introduced automatic voice-over translation for any YouTube video in English, Chinese, French, Spanish and German.\nOn 7 June 2023, the company launched a test of its first self-driving taxi in Moscow.\n\n## Facial recognition on cameras\nThe Kremlin planned in 2024 to use NTechLab's software for a secret center that will collect and analyze CCTV footage from across Russia.\nThe aim of the project is to 'identify threats in a timely manner' and 'monitor individuals for destructive and/or disloyal behavior'.\n\n## Open source\nIn 2009, Yandex began development on its project [MatrixNet](https://bliptext.com/articles/matrixnet).\nIt was a unique patented algorithm for the building of machine learning models, which used one of the original gradient boosting schemes.\nIn July 2017, the [CatBoost](https://bliptext.com/articles/catboost) library was released to the public.\nIt implements the Matrixnet algorithm for the building of machine learning models.\nAt the time of release, the technology was already in use as part of a collaborative project with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to analyze the results of conducted particle experiments CatBoost is used by foreign companies.\nFor example: [JetBrains](https://bliptext.com/articles/jetbrains) uses it for code completion, [CloudFlare](https://bliptext.com/articles/cloudflare) for bot detection, and [Careem](https://bliptext.com/articles/careem) for trip-distance determination.\nIn 2012, Yandex began research and development within the field of natural-speech processing.\nAnd in October 2023, the company introduced Yandex SpeechKit.\nIt is a speech-recognition and synthesis technology as well as a public API for speech recognition that Android and iOS developers can use.\nIn 2022, the company published the source code for the [YDB](https://bliptext.com/articles/ydb-database) database management system.\nIt is used in its own voice assistant Alice as well as in Yandex.Go and [Yandex Market](https://bliptext.com/articles/yandex-market) services.\nIn 2023, Yandex published the source code for YTsaurus.\nIt is a platform for work with big data.\n\n## Investments\nYandex is an [investor](https://bliptext.com/articles/investor) in several foreign companies.\nExamples include: Vizi Labs, [Face.com](https://bliptext.com/articles/face-com), [Blekko](https://bliptext.com/articles/blekko), and SalesPredict.\n\n# Security\nOn June 1, 2017, Yandex closed its offices in [Kyiv](https://bliptext.com/articles/kyiv) and [Odesa](https://bliptext.com/articles/odesa), Ukraine after the [Security Service of Ukraine](https://bliptext.com/articles/security-service-of-ukraine) raided the offices and accused the company of illegally collecting Ukrainian users' data and sending it to Russian security agencies.\nThe firm denied any wrongdoing.\nIn May 2017, all Yandex services were banned in Ukraine by Presidential Decree No. 133/2017.\nIn October and November 2018, Yandex was targeted in a cyberattack using the [Regin](https://bliptext.com/articles/regin-malware) malware, aimed at stealing technical information from its research and development unit on how users were authenticated.\nAn investigation by [Kaspersky Lab](https://bliptext.com/articles/kaspersky-lab) attributed the hacks to [Five Eyes](https://bliptext.com/articles/five-eyes) intelligence agencies.\nIn June 2019, [RBC](https://bliptext.com/articles/rbc-group) News reported that Yandex had refused a request by the Russian [Federal Security Service](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-security-service) (FSB) under the [Yarovaya law](https://bliptext.com/articles/yarovaya-law) to surrender encryption keys that could decrypt the private data of its e-mail service and cloud storage users.\nThe company argued that it was impossible to comply with the relevant law without compromising its users' privacy.\n[Maxim Akimov](https://bliptext.com/articles/maxim-akimov), [Deputy Prime Minister of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/deputy-prime-minister-of-russia), said that the government would take action to relieve FSB pressure on the company.\n[Alexander Zharov](https://bliptext.com/articles/alexander-zharov), head of the [Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media](https://bliptext.com/articles/federal-service-for-supervision-of-communications-information-technology-and-mass-media), subsequently said that Yandex and the FSB had reached an agreement where the company would provide the required data without handing over the encryption keys.\nIn February 2021 Yandex admitted that one of their system administrators with access rights to Yandex's email service had enabled unauthorized access, leading to almost 5,000 Yandex email inboxes being compromised.\nOn January 25, 2023, a leaked archive with approx. 44 GB of Yandex services was shared on BreachForums via [BitTorrent](https://bliptext.com/articles/bittorrent).\nIn June 2023 Yandex was fined by the Moscow court for its repeated refusal to share user information with the Federal Security Service.\n\n# News and media\nIn April 2014, a [film](https://bliptext.com/articles/film) about the history of Yandex called Startup was released.\nOn 20 April 2020, as a result of the [COVID-19 pandemic in Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/covid-19-pandemic-in-russia), Yandex made its home coronavirus testing service free of charge for all residents of Moscow and its surroundings, extending it to other regions in the future.\nPreviously, it announced the launch of the service on 16 April.\nIn late March 2022, Yandex was the subject of a [Financial Times](https://bliptext.com/articles/financial-times) investigation that had been initiated by the [nonprofit organization](https://bliptext.com/articles/nonprofit-organization) Me2B Alliance as part of an application auditing campaign led by researcher Zach Edwards.\nEdwards and four expert researchers, including [Cher Scarlett](https://bliptext.com/articles/cher-scarlett), a former [Apple](https://bliptext.com/articles/apple-inc) security engineer, found that a [software development kit](https://bliptext.com/articles/software-development-kit) (SDK) called AppMetrica, a product of Yandex, was harvesting data from more than 52,000 applications such as a user's [device fingerprint](https://bliptext.com/articles/device-fingerprint) and [IP address](https://bliptext.com/articles/ip-address) and storing it in Russia on Yandex's servers, which they said due to Russian law, and the nature of SDKs, could be accessed by Russian authorities without their knowledge and used to identify them.\nYandex said of identification by the data collected: \"Although theoretically possible, in practice it is extremely hard to identify users based solely on such information collected.\"\nOf authority requests for data they said: \"Any requests that fail to comply with all relevant procedural and legal requirements are turned down.\"\nAccording to [Meduza](https://bliptext.com/articles/meduza) investigation published on 5 May 2022, since 2016 the top-5 [news](https://bliptext.com/articles/news) on the Yandex's main page are formed on the basis of a secret list of Russian [media](https://bliptext.com/articles/media-communication) approved by [Presidential Administration of Russia](https://bliptext.com/articles/presidential-administration-of-russia), which includes only pro-Kremlin [media](https://bliptext.com/articles/media-communication).\nYandex stated that the highest-ranked news on its main page is generated automatically through its algorithm.\nBecause of laws around news aggregators, only news received from registered media sources may appear on it.\nIn March 2022, Yandex began to look for ways to offload its news aggregator and blogging-recommendation platform as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine as well as the Kremlin's increased control of the media and freedom of expression.\nYandex sought to focus on something that \"under no circumstances can be politicized in any way. Under the current conditions, it is impossible to continue developing content and information services that affect a large number of people.\"\nIn September 2022, Yandex sold its media assets.\nThe company transferred News, Zen, and also the main page yandex.ru to VK Holding.\n\n# Statistics and finance indicators\nThe largest Russian Internet company in revenue.\nBy the number of processed requests is in the top world search engines.\nAccording to the analytical service \"Yandex. Radar\", the company's share in the Russian search market (including search on mobile devices) in the third quarter of 2020 averaged 59.3%.\nIn the fourth quarter of 2019, on Android devices in Russia, the share of search queries to Yandex was 54.3%.\nThe number of search queries increased by 7% compared to the same period in the fourth quarter of 2018.\nDynamics of the daily number of search queries Yandex Search\nAfter the announcement on July 13, 2017 that Yandex.Taxi and Uber were merging their businesses, the market capitalization of Yandex on the NASDAQ stock exchange grew to $10.73 billion, and the value of Yandex shares during day increased by 15.99% to 31.7 dollars per paper.\nAt the end of 2019, consolidated revenue increased by 37% compared to 2018, to 175.4 billion rubles ($2,833.2 million).\nRevenue increased by 39% compared to 2018 (excluding Yandex. Market).\nThe company's net profit amounted to 11.2 billion rubles ($180.9 million) and, compared to 2018, decreased by 75%.\nIn February 2020, Russian Forbes estimated the company’s value at $14.6 billion, placing it first in the list of the most valuable companies on the Runet.","revisionCount":3},"hasMore":false,"nextCursor":null}