Arkady Volozh

Who is Arkady Volozh?

Arkady Yurievich Volozh is the principal founder of Russian search engine Yandex. He has been the company’s CEO and a director since 2000. Arkady founded Yandex in 1997; in 2000, he left his position of CEO at CompTek International to become the CEO of Yandex.

Volozh is a serial entrepreneur with a background in computer science. He studied applied mathematics at Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas, graduating in 1986. 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 telecom 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”.

As of 2013, he is worth an estimated US$1.15 billion.