# Arkady Volozh

Arkady Yuryevich Volozh (Russian: Аркадий Юрьевич Волож; born 11 February 1964) is a Russian businessman, technology entrepreneur, computer scientist, investor and philanthropist. He pioneered the development of search and navigation technology as well as intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. Volozh co-founded several IT enterprises, including CompTek, Arkadia, InfiNet and Yandex.
In June 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the EU imposed sanctions against Volozh and he resigned from all his positions at Yandex. The reasons cited by the EU for sanctioning Volozh were him being a 'leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation', 'Russian State-owned banks such as Sberbank and VTB are shareholders and investors in Yandex' and the Russian Federation having a veto over the 'sale of material IP and the sale or transfer of Russian users’ personal data to foreign companies', and the search engine was accused of promoting propaganda. These reasons were called 'poor and dubious' by Anders Åslund and Gerhard Mangott commented that 'It is hard to understand what Volozh is being accused of. Yandex argued that it had no choice but to follow Russia’s strict censorship laws, and the company sold its news service soon after the invasion. In contrast to the EU, the US and the UK never sanctioned Volozh. In March 2024, Volozh was removed from the EU sanctions list. In July 2024, the holding company that he leads, Nebius Group, sold all of its interest in Yandex for a fraction of its original value and severed all of its ties with Russia.
Following the Russian annexation of the Crimea in 2014, Volozh moved to Tel Aviv with his family.
As of January 2025, he has a net worth of $1.5 billion, according to Forbes.

## Early life

Volozh was born in Guryev, Kazakh SSR, Soviet Union (now Atyrau, Kazakhstan) into a Russian-Jewish family. His father was a petroleum geologist, and his mother was a music teacher. He attended Republican School of Physics and Mathematics in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and then studied applied mathematics at Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas in Moscow, graduating in 1986.

## Career

Volozh is a serial entrepreneur with a background in computer science. After working at a state pipeline research institute, he started a small business importing personal computers from Austria. He went on to co-found several IT enterprises besides Yandex, including a Russian provider of wireless networking technology InfiNet Wireless, and CompTek International, one of the largest distributors of network and telecommunications equipment in Russia.
Volozh co-founded CompTek in 1989. He also started working on search in 1989, which led to him establishing Arkadia Company in 1990. The company was developing search software. In 1993, Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich developed a search engine for "non-structured information with Russian morphology".
Volozh co-founded Yandex in 1997, later leaving his position as CEO of CompTek International to become the CEO of Yandex in 2000. Yandex, a Nasdaq listed company, developed, and offered a variety of technologies and services under Volozh, in the fields of Ecommerce, navigation, mobility, autonomous vehicles, payments, music, emails and more. The Yandex IPO in 2011 was the largest one until then, after the Google IPO in 2004. In November 2021 the company was valued at $30 billion.
As part of a larger effort to spread machine learning, Volozh and the Yandex team established the Yandex School of Data Analysis in 2007, offering a free master's level program in data science. The program has grown to include six branches, online courses, and other learning programs through multiple partnerships. In 2018, the school opened a branch in Tel Aviv to launch a one-year career advancement program in machine learning.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in May 2022 Volozh wrote a letter to then Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, and to the ministers of finance, interior, and innovation & technology stating that 'I have made a decision to move the global Yandex headquarters to Tel Aviv and bring many hundreds of developers, engineers and technologists to Israel'. In June 2022, sanctions were imposed against Volozh and he then resigned from all his positions at Yandex.
In August 2023 Volozh announced that he was 'totally against Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine, where I, like many, have friends and relatives. I am horrified by the fact that every day bombs fly into the homes of Ukrainians'. He also stated that although he moved to Israel in 2014, he has to take his share of responsibility for the Russia's actions. By the time of his announcement Volozh was only the second sanctioned Russian businessman to take a stance against the invasion. In an interview with Bloomberg in January 2025, Volozh said that it took 18 months to issue a statement on the war because he first needed to relocate 1,000 Yandex employees who wanted to leave Russia.
In March 2024, Volozh was removed from the EU sanctions list. In July 2024, the Dutch holding company Yandex NV sold all of its Russian assets, which accounted for more than 95% of the companies' revenues, to a consortium of Russian buyers, while retrained its non-Russian assets. Before the invasion of Ukraine, Yandex was valued $30 billion, however, by 2024 its market capitalisation stood only at $10.2 billion. Since 2022 all foreign asset sales must be approved by the Russian government, a mandatory discount of 50% or more should be applied on them, and 10% of the sell value must be donated to the Russian budget, which is euphemistically called 'voluntary contribution to the budget'. The sale was finalized at $5.2 billion, which represents the largest corporate exit from Russia. The remaining non-Russian assets were reorganized as the Nebius Group and Volozh began using his expertise in managing infrastructure for a large technology company to expand the capabilities of Nebius Group to manage the computing demands for other large technology companies.

## Life in Israel

In 2014, following the Russian annexation of Crimea, Volozh moved to Tel-Aviv, Israel, where he lives with his family. His parents also moved to Israel the same year. Volozh's connection to Israel began a few years before that; from 2010 to 2012 he served as a board member of Face.com, an Israeli facial-recognition company which was sold to Facebook in 2012. Volozh was also an investor in the company. From 2015 to 2020 he served as a board member of NeuroSteer, an Israeli company that specialized in brain signal processing and big data analysis. He later moved on to launch a series of services in Israel as well as opening an office and an R&D center in the country. In an interview in 2019 Volozh stated that Israel is a very attractive country, first and foremost because of its human potential, and also because of its role in the global economy. Volozh also frequently appears in professional technological conventions and forums in Israel.
According to Agentstvo, the website of Volozh described him as "a Kazakhstan-born, Israeli tech entrepreneur, computer scientist, investor, and philanthropist" and did not mention his Russian background. Yandex was described as "one of the largest internet companies in Europe" and its Russian origins were not mentioned. Kyiv Post, citing Wikiganda, argues that Volozh deleted some elements related to his past life in Russia on his Wikipedia page using an IP address.

## Personal life

He is married to Irina Volozh, whom he met while studying at university, and they have 6 children. In 2016, Volozh applied for and received Maltese citizenship through its investment program. As of 2025 he lives in Tel Aviv with his family, and is an Israeli citizen. In June 2022, Volozh was sanctioned by European Union, a move that drew criticism from a number of experts familiar with his case. In February 2024, the European Union decided not to extend sanctions against Volozh.
His son Lev Volozh is a founder of MoscowFresh and a former manager of the Yandex Taxi service. His son Timofey is a New York-based jazz drummer who since March 2022 promoted and played at benefit concerts aimed at supporting Ukraine. His daughter Anna-Ester is an LGBTQIA+ campaigner based in London who runs the Dragonbee animation agency. Commenting on the highly unconventional path some of Volozh's children took in the context of the distinctly conservative world of Russia and Russian billionaires, an interviewee for a profile article on Volozh said 'This is why, when the EU put Arkady on the sanction list, the Kremlin must have had a huge laugh'.