A Surprise $4B AI IPO
Yandex $YNDX (delisted) was a great IPO. Investors lost a lot of money after the Russian invasion, resulting in the delisting of the multi-billion internet company. Yandex was the "everything" company serving Russia. They were both the "Google" and the "Amazon" of the region.
Over the past two years, the parent company embarked on a tortuous journey to divest the sanctioned assets and salvage what they could of the business.
What has emerged is Nebius Group $NBIS, a new Amsterdam-based, US-listed public company with over 1,300 employees and $2B in cash. The company's core is in the AI-centric cloud data center business, with several private AI companies in areas like data sourcing, autonomous driving, and education. The employee base also has an engineering concentration including cloud, AI, ML, LLM and data.
We still have a lot of work to do on this one (the IPO deck alone is 92 slides), and although it's been a long time coming, it just started trading yesterday.
This note will lay some groundwork for investors and help prepare us for the first company public ER on Thursday, October 31st.
We've reserved the rest of this post and our work on Nebius for our paid members.