Ilya Segalovich

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Ilya Valentinovich Segalovich (13 September 1964 – 27 July 2013) was a Russian programmer who co-founded the tech company Yandex and served as its CTO and a director from 2000 until his death. He suggested the name “Yandex” for the search engine, derived from “Yet Another iNDEX.”

Born in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) to a Russian-Jewish family, Segalovich studied physics and mathematics in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and geophysics in Moscow. He began his career in information retrieval in 1990 at Arkadia, later leading the retrieval systems department at CompTek International from 1993 to 2000 before starting Yandex with Arkady Volozh. He had two daughters and supported Maria’s Children Art Rehabilitation Center for orphans and children with special needs.

Segalovich died in London on 27 July 2013 after complications from stomach cancer. He was one of Russia’s notable tech entrepreneurs, with a net worth around a few hundred million dollars from his Yandex stake (about 2.5%–2.9). In 2011, Forbes Russia ranked him 159th among the country’s richest, with an estimated wealth of roughly $233 million, a figure later linked to his stake in Yandex. He sold part of his stake during Yandex’s IPO for about $20.5 million, saying the money would be used for charity.