Yandex Self Driving Group Takes a New Leap With $150M In Investment
We are about to take the next big step in our story, becoming Yandex Self Driving Group — a standalone company with a new investment of $150 million.
It’s hard to believe that it was only in 2017 that our journey began. Since then, we have developed world-class technology that enables driverless vehicles to safely navigate city streets, launched Europe’s first robotaxi service and have set on a path towards putting our autonomous technology to use in different applications.
Our self-driving fleet has grown to 130 cars and drove more than 4 million autonomous miles on city streets in Russia, Israel, and the US. By the end of this year, our fleet is set to expand to 200 cars with new Hyundai Sonatas — our fourth-generation self-driving cars, jointly developed with Hyundai Mobis. The next-generation vehicles are already roaming the streets of Moscow, Innopolis and Ann Arbor, MI, our newest location for long-term testing.
Our robotaxi service has been safely shuttling passengers without anyone behind the steering wheel since August 2018 and in May of this year, we marked another important milestone with the commercial deployment of Yandex.Rover, our autonomous delivery robot.
Our success was made possible by Yandex’s support, infrastructure, and engineering talent, allowing us to achieve great things at a fraction of industry costs, with approximately $65 million cumulative investment since 2017.
We are pleased to continue having access to Yandex’s infrastructure, resources, and know-how after our spin-off from MLU BV, a ride-hailing and foodtech joint venture between Yandex and Uber, operating under the brand of Yandex.Taxi. Our parent company will increase its stake in Yandex Self Driving Group to 73%, while we continue to work to develop technology for the long-term integration into ride-hailing, food delivery, car sharing, e-commerce, and logistics projects within Yandex ecosystem and beyond.
“We’ve been developing technology that can be applied to various types of vehicles and suitable for different road, traffic and weather conditions around the world,” said Dmitry Polishchuk, CEO of Yandex Self Driving Group. “There is still a lot to be done to apply this technology to ride-hailing, food delivery, ecommerce, and many more adjacent categories in the longer-term. The creation of a new company, with significant support from Yandex, positions us well for the further acceleration of our development.”
Forging ahead on this new path will help us further progress towards our goal of creating a safe and convenient transportation ecosystem. We are extremely excited to embark on this important step in our journey under the new Yandex Self Driving Group brand.
