From startup to IPO: Yandex milestones, 1990

1990

Two information search systems — the International Classifier of Inventions and the Goods and Services Classifier — were developed in DOS by Arcadia, the company founded by Arkady Volozh and Arkady Borkovsky. These systems provided the foundation for Yandex’s technology.

1993

Arcadia became a division of CompTek, a distributor of Internet equipment and co-owned by Arkady Volozh.
The system’s linguistic capabilities were enhanced and tailored to the Russian language under a joint program with the Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1994, a “Bible computer directory” was developed based on the technology.

1996

After failing to commercialize the technology (Rambler and Infoart, leading developers of research technologies, declined offers of a few dozen thousand dollars), CompTek decided to develop it further on its own.
The first Yandex products (Yandex.Site, Yandex.Dict) were announced at the Netcom ’96 exhibition in October. Yandex.Site was presented to website owners as a tool for searching through their content. Yandex.Dict enabled morphological search queries. A few months later, the company launched Yandex.CD and Yandex.Lib.
The two founders of the technology, Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, coined the term “Yandex” as an acronym for the phrase “Yet Another Indexer.”

1997

The Yandex.ru search engine was officially presented on September 23, 1997, at SofTool Exhibition.
The engine was already offering some distinctive features such relevance evaluation. The engine began offering the capability to make requests in natural language.

1998

Facing the rapid growth of the Russian Internet, Yandex continued to improve its technologies, optimizing its search mechanisms and making them more scalable. Among its new functions were a similar-documents search, a search within a given date range, and a classification of search results according to the time of the last change.
The company placed its first contextual advertisement.

1999

Yandex offered new functionality, including search-restriction features such as Yandex.Family, which filters search results for children’s protection.
Yandex introduced its citation index, which counts the number of resources offering links to a site.

2000

At the beginning of the year, the search engine recorded fewer than 50,000 visitors a day (fourth of five positions among Russian search engines—far below Rambler). Its annual revenue barely reached $70,000.
In April, a consortium of investors led by Ru-Net Holdings, an affiliate of Baring Vostok Capital Partners, invested $5.3 million for a 35.72% stake. Managers and developers also received shares. Under the deal, CompTek spun off Yandex into a separate company while retaining control. Arkady Volozh left his position of CEO at CompTek to become the CEO of Yandex. Since this initial round, Yandex has never again needed to raise additional funds.
That same month a Yandex television advertising campaign debuted—the first-ever commercial on Russian TV for an Internet company.
The company launched Yandex.Mail, Yandex.News, Yandex.Guru, Yandex.Goods, Yandex.Cards, and Yandex.Bookmarks, as well as the the uncluttered version Ya.ru.

2001

In summer, Yandex became the largest Russian-language site in terms of audience.
The firm launched Yandex.Direct, its auction-based context advertising placement service.

2002

In August, the company’s revenues exceeded its expenses for the first time. Yandex became fully profitable in the last quarter.
Yandex launched Yandex.Money, a national electronic currency, and Yandex.Market, which quickly became a leading online marketplace.

2003

Yandex paid out dividends to shareholders for the first time.
Yandex expanded its search capability beyond HTML files to support searches of RTF, PDF, and DOC files. It also released a new line of search solutions, including Yandex.Server, Yandex.Publisher, and Yandex.SDK.
Yandex.Direct, the contextual advertising offer, shifted to a CPC business model.

2004

The company’s sales increased to $18 million, a tenfold increase compared to 2002 sales. Net income reached $7 million. Search engine advertising accounted for 75% of gross revenues.
Yandex launched Yandex.Map and Clean Mail (“Spamooborona”), a server-side spam filtering solution, in addition to a service for searching through blogs and forums. The company also began deploying a Wi-Fi network.
The firm regionalized its offer by launching Yandex.Goroda (Yandex.Cities) and offering local versions of Yandex.News and Yandex.Market.
Yandex established its first grant program to support fundamental sciences and mathematics related to the Internet. More then 500 academics contributed their research papers for consideration.

2005

Yandex opened a representative office in Ukraine.
The company launched its advertising network as well as new services Yandex.Addresses, Yandex.Afisha, Yandex.Lenta, and Yandex Personal Search.

2006

While the Internet was becoming widely popular in Russia, Yandex continued launching new services and improving existing ones.
The Yandex search engine was installed on Mail.ru, Russia’s leading webmail service and portal (until 2009).
Between 2004 and 2006, various transactions occured between shareholders. Tiger Technologies acquired 11% from different shareholders.
Yandex began its first IPO talks.

2007

2008

Yandex launched its video search service.
The firm opened a laboratory in Palo Alto, California, “with the objective of fostering innovation in search and advertising technology.”
Yandex acquired Mediaselling, a display-ad company.
Alisher Usmanov, the Kremlin-friendly oligarch who later backed DST, failed to acquire a 10% stake in Yandex.
In Autumn, Yandex postponed its planned IPO due to the unfavorable conditions on stock exchanges.

2009

Sberbank acquired a golden share. The national savings bank thus got veto power on the sale of more than 25% of the shares. The move confirmed that the Russian government regarded Yandex as a sensitive asset.

2010

In September 2010, Yandex invested in Face.com, a Tel-Aviv–based facial recognition technology startup, and in Vizi Labs, another Israeli startup focused on researching and developing image processing technologies.
In May, the company launched Yandex.com, the English version of its search system (Yandex.com); in July, it introduced People’s Map, a user-generated map service. In late 2010, Yandex offered Yandex.Panorama, a service offering panoramic photo images of streets in Russian and Ukrainian cities, as well as classifieds services Yandex.Jobs and Yandex.Real Estate.

2011

From startup to IPO: Yandex milestones, 1990–2011