Russian search engine company Yandex is the largest investor (USD 15 mln) in a USD 30 mln round of financing for another search engine – Blekko.com. The 10 percent stake acquired by Yandex puts its CEO, Arkadiy Volozh, on Blekko’s Board of Directors.
Blekko.com (www.blekko.com)
Blekko.com is a slashtag search engine that customizes search results to exclude spam and low-quality websites. The company was founded in 2007 and is headed by CEO and co-founder, Rich Skrenta. Blekko currently only has 224,000 unique visitors per day but has so far received more than USD 24 mln in investments between 2007 and 2010. Launched in 2010, the engine’s web index now contains 3 bln pages.
Yandex (www.yandex.ru)
As the largest Internet search engine in the Russian-speaking world, Yandex aims to be Russia’s leading Internet and technology company. They specialize in taking their understanding of Russian culture and language and applying it to a search portal which provides services like national and international news, local news, e-mail, user content, and more.
The company succesfully completed its first NASDAQ IPO in May 2011 which valued USD 1.3 billion.
Yandex’s 2011 second quarter financial results show massive growth (57%) from Q2 2010 with its reported USD 161.7 million in revenue.
12/10/2011
Central & Eastern Europe, Internet, E-Commerce & E-Services, Private Equity News, Russia, USA