Yandex May Relocate Self-Driving Cars R&D to Israel

Russian tech giant Yandex, often described as 'the Google of Russia', eyes selling its driverless transport in the foreign markets and has already transferred its services to non-Russian providers' cloud infrastructure.

Since the start of the Ukrainian crisis, Yandex has strived to continue developing and expanding its services under sanctions. The company has had wide presence in Israel, as well as research facilities in some other countries, with the main office and most of the engineers still being in Russia. Now, the company may be divided into separate entities that will be able to work abroad fearing no sanctions.

According to the Russian Kommersant newspaper, Yandex plans to transfer the development of self-driving taxis and delivery robots to Israel. The company already discusses a brand name for the product choosing among roovvy.ai, avride.ai and avnear.ai.

Kommersant's source in the company said that the team has already begun transferring its processes from domestic platforms to foreign services. In particular, driverless transport development team will move from the Startrack task manager to YouTrack or Jira, and transfer the system code from the Yandex internal repository to GitHub. A corporate account called roovvy.ai has been recently found on the platform.

By September, the most critical processes of the project will be transferred to cloud infrastructure. One of the sources in the company said that will help the company to quickly transfer processes from its own infrastructure to external clouds, such as Amazon. Currently, the company plans to start offering its driverless services in Serbia.

Yandex created driverless transport department in 2017, and in 2020 it became a separate company Yandex Self-Driving Group (Yandex SDG). In 2018, the company got approval from Israeli regulators to start testing the technology in the country. In August 2021, Morgan Stanley valued Yandex's self-driving transport business at $7 billion.