Yandex Investing in Startups

Internet, April 14, 2011. Yandex has launched a startup investment program,Yandex.Factory. The program offers funding opportunities to Russian and international projects.

Yandex will finance startup projects with demonstrated potential in their seed or early investment stage. The company is ready to fund a project’s technology or product development with up to hundreds of thousands US dollars.

“Yandex is growing fast. We are full of ideas, but it’s not always easy to do everything at once. If we spot a young, talented team of like-minded people doing interesting and relevant things on the market, we are eager to support them in all possible ways, including financing. We feel it is important that the industry keeps growing and we have an opportunity to make sure it does,” says Ksenia Yolkina, Project Manager of Yandex.Factory.

To join the Yandex.Factory program, startup teams in Russia or the CIS can present their projects at the company’s traditional open-doors event, Yandex.Start. International teams can send their application atventures@yandex-team.ru. To learn more about the Yandex.Factory program, please visit the program’sweb page.

Yandex has been commited to working with startup projects since June 2010. Since then, the company has hosted the Yandex.Start open-doors event three times, which resulted in the purchase of technologies fromWebVisorand Loginza. Yandex.Factory is yet another form of partnership for startups.

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Yandex is the leading internet company in Russia operating the most popular search engine and most visited website. In 2010, Yandex generated 64% of all search traffic in Russia, while its homepage attracted a monthly average of 21.5 million users. Yandex also operates in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus.