MOSCOW, July 25 (RIA Novosti) – Ilya Segalovich, who co-founded search engine Yandex, one of Russia’s most successful companies, has died from cancer aged 48, according to a statement released by Yandex on Thursday.
“I was friends with Ilya since school; we sat behind the same desk for four years. And then we created Yandex together. Last night he died. Everything happened too quickly and unexpectedly,” Arkady Volozh, who set-up Yandex with Segalovich in the 1990s, wrote in a blog entry on the Yandex website.
Segalovich was responding well to treatment for cancer, but died suddenly from complications early on Thursday morning, Yandex said in the statement.
Segalovich's Twitter feed reveals that he was active and mobile as recently as last week - several tweets show that he was eager to take part in street demonstrations in Moscow to protest the five-year prison sentence handed down to opposition leader Alexei Navalny, but was unable to attend because he was traveling outside the country.
Segalovich and Volozh set up Yandex in the early 1990s and it has grown into the most popular search engine in Russia, ahead of international giant Google.
In 2011 the company raised $1.4 billion in New York during an oversubscribed initial public offering (IPO). The fierce demand for the stock made it one of the most successful foreign listings ever by a Russian company. Today Yandex is valued at about $10 billion.
As well as his technological genius and business acumen, Segalovich was known for his linguistic creativity, and is credited with thinking up the name Yandex in 1993. The name plays on the Russian letter "ya," which means "I," and originally stood for “Yet Another iNDEX,” according to the company’s website.
Segalovich also devoted significant amounts of his time and money to Maria’s Children, a charity which uses art therapy to assist Russian orphans to adapt to society after they leave orphanages. Segalovich's second wife was the charity’s founder, Maria Yeliseeva, with whom he had several children.
While he always took care to separate his personal opinions from his work at Yandex, Segalovich worked as a volunteer election observer during the 2012 presidential elections, according to an interview in Forbes Magazine. He also took part in opposition protest marches in Moscow, Navalny said in a blog post Thursday.
Born in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) in 1964, Segalovich went to school in Kazakhstan, before studying geophysics at the Moscow Geological Exploration Institute. Since 2000 he has been Yandex’s Chief Technology Officer, and a director at the company. He held 2.5 percent of Yandex's capital, and 6.87 percent of its shareholder voting rights.
“I don’t know what can replace his encyclopedic knowledge of technology, and his pure vision of the product," Volozh wrote in his statement on the Yandex site. "But he has left behind a whole new generation of programmers, a whole school. And his ethical standards are a benchmark for us all.”
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