Arkady Volozh

Arkadi Jurjewitsch Wolosch (Russian Аркадий Юрьевич Волож; born February 11, 1964 in Gurjev, Kazakh SSR ) is a Russian computer scientist, entrepreneur, founder of the company Yandex and current billionaire.

Life and career

Arkadi Wolosch was born in Gurjev (now Atyrau ) in the Kazakh Soviet Republic. He began studying applied mathematics at the Moscow State Institute of Oil and Gas, which he completed in 1986. He was active then as an entrepreneur and founded several companies, including the software manufacturer Arkadia.

In 1993 he founded together with Ilya Segalowitsch the IT company Comptek. In Comptek he developed together with Segalowitsch and Jelena Kolmanowskaja the Internet search engine Yandex, which was officially launched in 1997 - a year before Google. As the first search engine Yandex ever could handle cyrillic characters. Two years later, Yandex was already one of the most popular websites in Russia. In 2000 Yandex was finally established as a separate company and developed within a few years becoming a billion dollar company, which today operates numerous other products in addition to the search engine and in many other countries outside Russia is active.

Arkadi Woloschs fortune is estimated at about 1.15 billion dollars. He is still active as CEO of Yandex.