Is Russia’s Largest Tech Company Too Big to Fail?

Arkady Yurievich Volozh seemed to be in good spirits. It was February 11, his birthday, and the 58-year-old billionaire CEO and cofounder of Yandex, the Russian tech behemoth, was in the sort of open, engaging mood that could be called privetliviy, after the casual Russian word privet for hello. He was speaking from his car in Tel Aviv, bragging about his father—an oil geologist in his eighties who had “discovered” oil in Israel, Volozh said—as we chatted about my upcoming trip to Tel Aviv to interview him for this story.

For more than 20 years, Yandex has been known as “Russia’s Google”: It began as a search engine in 1997 and still has a 60 percent share of the Russian search market. But for the past decade, this tag has understated the company’s inescapable ubiquity in Russians’ daily life. Yandex Music is the country’s leader in paid music streaming, and Yandex Taxi is the top ride-hailing app. Millions of Russians use Yandex Navigator, Yandex Market, Yandex News, and Yoo Money (formerly Yandex Wallet) to get around, shop online, read, and spend money.

Volozh has only recently begun to make his company less reliant on its Russian business—and on the whims of President Vladimir Putin—by tiptoeing westward. Yandex Taxi formed a joint venture with Uber in 2017, and in 2020 Yandex began testing self-driving cars in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Last year, the Yandex Rover robot, something of a six-wheeled Igloo cooler, began delivering food via a partnership with Grubhub to college campuses in Arizona and Ohio, with plans to expand to 250 American campuses. Yandex had also launched delivery services in London and Paris. On the day of our call, Yandex had a $16 billion market capitalization on Nasdaq, and about 85 percent of all its shares were traded in the United States.