Mobility

BlaBlaCar stops offering its services in Crimea to avoid EU sanctions

November 12, 2020

BlaBlaCar, the carpooling giant born in France, has stopped offering its services in Crimea, where it had been operating since 2014. The decision aims to avoid being targeted by the EU sanctions against firms operating on the peninsula, according to company representatives cited by local news website Crimea.Info. Since Russia took control of Crimea, a Ukrainian …

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Taxi-hailing and foodtech on the rise: Yandex announces growing and more diversified revenues in 2019

November 12, 2020

Last week Yandex, the NASDAQ-listed Russian Internet giant, announced its unaudited financial results for Q4 and FY 2019. Consolidated yearly revenues grew 37% from 2018, reaching 175.4 billion rubles ($2.83 billion). Yandex’s adjusted net income increased by a more modest 6% to 23.5 billion rubles ($380.3 million). These results are below what analysts had pencilled in, …

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Sovereign fund RDIF to back car sales platform, food delivery service and online travel agency

November 12, 2020

On Wednesday, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) announced its intention to invest in three big Russian startups. The sovereign wealth fund is teaming up with Baring Vostok, a leading Russian private equity firm, and unnamed funds from the Middle East, to invest in CarPrice. Founded in …

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Russian billionaire Alexey Mordashov wants to create “a kind of Amazon”

January 23, 2020

Can a Russian billionaire become a digital leader after making his fortune in steel? “We have several investments related to human needs: education, medicine, traveling and retail. We are thinking of creating an ecosystem based on these assets – a kind of Amazon,” Alexey Mordashov told Bloomberg. “Each of these areas is on the verge of great change,” …

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FT: Yandex to launch car-sharing in Europe

November 12, 2020

Yandex, the Russian NASDAQ-listed Internet giant, is planning to launch its car-sharing service in Europe, the Financial Times has reported. The head of Yandex.Drive, the company’s car-sharing division, Anton Ryazanov, told the paper it would roll-out the service with a 1,000-strong fleet of electric cars later this year.  Yandex has not yet decided which city it …

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BlaBlaCar completes acquisition of bus ticketing platform Busfor

November 12, 2020

BlaBlaCar, the carpooling giant born in France, is expanding to a new market segment with the acquisition of international bus ticketing platform Busfor. The deal, announced in September, has just been completed after obtaining the required antitrust permits in Ukraine, reports Kyiv Post. The terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, but it might …

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Russian designer invests in US startup to reinvent online travel booking

December 11, 2019

Last month EightyDays, a US startup born in Belarus, secured an undisclosed amount in a seed round of funding from Artem Lebedev. The famous Russian designer saw in this startup’s technology “an incredible, fantastic, extraordinary new way of making travel bookings online” (see video). EightyDays has created a multi-destination booking service intended for international travellers planning a …

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Russian Railways teams up with RVC to launch transport tech funds

December 8, 2019

RVC, the Russian state-owned fund of funds dedicated to innovation, and RZD (Russian Railways) have teamed up to launch to two venture funds for industrial and digital investments. Scheduled for launch in 2021, the funds will support early-stage projects which have “the potential of developing synergies with the railways company and increasing its business efficiency.” …

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Sberbank enters driverless car market, posing a new challenge to Yandex

December 5, 2019

Sberbank, the Russian state-controlled financial and technological giant, is making its first steps on the young and vibrant market of driverless vehicles. The bank announced last week its partnership with Cognitive Technologies, a Russian software corporation that develops AI-based driver assistance systems. Founded in 1993, this company offers a variety of components for unmanned vehicles …

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Yandex.Taxi considers IPO; self-driving business unit to spin off

November 12, 2020

Yandex.Taxi, the taxi-hailing company which merged activities in Russia and some neighboring countries with Uber last year, is considering going public through a dual-listing in Russia and the USA. The company is in talks to hire Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to manage the potential IPO. “An IPO is something we are considering as we have said previously, and we work …

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In Moscow, 200,000 cameras with advanced facial recognition software track 12.6 million citizens

November 12, 2020

Officials in Moscow have spent the last few years methodically assembling one of the most comprehensive video-surveillance operations in the world. The public-private network of as many as 200,000 cameras records 1.5 billion hours of footage a year that can be accessed by 16,000 government employees, intelligence officers and law-enforcement personnel. Now the entire system …

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From Moscow, to Tel Aviv, to Las Vegas, Yandex’s driverless cars drove 1 million miles

November 12, 2020

Yandex, the NASDAQ-listed Russian Internet giant, celebrates 1 million miles driven by its unmanned cars. The company now claims to be “Europe’s largest driverless car developer” and among the top five companies globally, competing with Baidu, Cruise Automation, Uber and Waymo. Yandex’s driverless cars are currently being experimented on public roads in Moscow and Innopolis (Russia) as well as Tel Aviv (Israel), …

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