Arkady Yurievich Volozh is a Russian billionaire technology entrepreneur, investor, computer scientist, and philanthropist, best known as the founder and CEO of Yandex. Yandex is a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning; it is one of Europe's largest Internet companies, operating Russia's most popular search engine. Volozh co-founded several IT enterprises and in his early days, and pioneered the development of search with new technology advancements and search software companies.
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". Arkady co-founded Yandex in 1997, later leaving his position as CEO of CompTek International to become the CEO of Yandex in 2000. 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.
Personal life
Volozh is married, has three children and lives in Moscow. In early 2016 Volozh purchased Maltese citizenship even though he has no ties to Malta. Since Malta is in the European Union this automatically qualifies Volozh as a citizen of the European Union., he is worth an estimated US$1.15 billion.
