Yandex announced the opportunity for startups to develop within the company

Yandex has extended the deadline for submitting applications for participation in the startup accelerator until December 30. Participants with the most promising developments, in addition to cash grants and cloud resources, can get the opportunity to develop startups in the company's ecosystem with experts from taxi services, delivery, e-commerce, as well as the School of Data Analysis, the company said.

"For startups, this can be an additional resource for quickly scaling their developments to a million—strong audience in real business, and for Yandex, it can be an opportunity to attract promising projects to the company's ecosystem. At the same time, it is possible to participate with high—tech projects at an early stage: we are ready to work with ideas that are confirmed by hypotheses, and not only with already established businesses," the company noted.

Nikita Borisov, Technical Director of Yandex City services, said that the company aims to work with strong teams that are ready to scale their ideas. "The format can be different: from a technological partnership to other individual options — we will choose the one that will be beneficial to both sides. We don't want everything to end with a beautiful presentation — it's important that together with the teams we go from spectacular slides to successful implementation," Borisov added.

Formats for the possible development of projects in the Yandex ecosystem can be proposed at the demo day in April 2026 and will be discussed individually with each team. The experts will assess the maturity of the projects and take into account their compliance with the company's strategic priorities. At the same time, each startup will decide on the development of the project independently.

The prize fund of the Yandex AI Startup Lab is 6 million rubles. According to the company, during the first week of the selection, more than 30% of applications were received with projects in the field of AI, another third with developments in the field of hardware solutions and robotics, as well as mathematical modeling and algorithms.

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