Yandex closes most of its international AI startups

According to open sources, Yandex has almost completely closed its operations in the field of international AI startups. These projects have been actively developing since 2022, when the company registered the Beyond ML holding in the United States and Armenia to promote ten innovative solutions. However, to date, information about most of them has disappeared from the holding's website.

Closed projects

Of the ten Beyond ML startups, eight have ceased operations. Among them:

• Lawrify, a service that used AI to check legal documents, closed in early 2024 due to low user interest.
• Smelter, an analytics platform for media in Latin America, ceased operations in August.
• Sellesta, a tool for sellers on Amazon, is no longer functioning.
• Membrace, a content moderation platform.
• Recommendix, a service for managing prices and assortment on marketplaces.
• askthecrowd — a tool for testing products and services before launch.
• Tune The Model — provided GPT-like language models as a service.
• Tune The Ads — AI for creating Google Ads ad texts.

Current projects

While most initiatives are being closed, two startups continue their work:

1. Meteum — an AI-powered weather forecasting app that has become popular in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. To date, it has been downloaded over 2 million times on Google Play and about 100,000 times on the App Store.
2. Neurodub (now Dubformer) — a video translation service into over 70 languages. Its legal address has now changed (Amsterdam and Belgrade), and it is assumed that it no longer belongs to Yandex. The service cooperates with Nebius, a company founded by Arkady Volozh.

Yandex Commentary

The company's press service noted that Yandex is constantly testing new ideas, some of which eventually become successful services, while others remain experiments. The company's employees actively move between projects, implementing their skills in different teams.

According to the company, despite the curtailment of most international initiatives, Yandex intends to continue experiments, focusing on creating new useful products for users.