Secretly, Jeff Bezos Leads Giant Investment In Broken AI Startup From Yandex!

JAKARTA - Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, through his investment firm Bezos Expeditions, led US$72 million (approximately IDR 1.1 trillion) funding for Toloka, an artificial intelligence data solutions provider (AI). This was conveyed by Toloka on Wednesday 7 May.

Toloka is part of the Nebius Group, an AI infrastructure company listed on the Nasdaq exchange, and has teamed up with a number of world tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Anthropic. The company uses a network of experts and human testers to help train and evaluate AI models.

Toloka and Nebius were previously part of Russian internet giant Yandex but broke away from Yandex's domestic assets through a $5.4 billion deal last year. This is one of the largest corporate exit actions from Russia since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Toloka CEO and founder Olga Megorskaya called Bezos' strategic investment an important milestone that will accelerate Toloka's growth, especially in the United States market. This investment also supports the development of products that involve collaboration between human experts and AI agents.

"There will always be a need for supervision, verification, and assistance from human experts to ensure the final results are really of high quality," Megorskaya was quoted as saying by VOI from Reuters.

This investment does not only involve Bezos. Mikhail Parakhin, CTO of Canadian e-commerce company Shopify, also participated and will serve as Executive Chairman in Toloka's new board of directors.

"I am very enthusiastic about joining Toloka when the need for world-class AI data expertise is increasingly urgent," said Parakhin.

Prior to the separation from Yandex, Toloka had difficulty obtaining funding from foreign parties such as Bezos due to sanctions prohibiting US investment in Russia. Now that it has officially separated, foreign investment opportunities are wide open.

Last year, NVIDIA was also listed as one of the investors in the USD 700 million private funding conducted by Nebius.

Although Nebius remains the majority shareholder economically, they have relinquished control of the majority vote in Toloka, giving the company greater operational freedom.

"The most important thing about this funding is that we get the flexibility needed to operate independently," explains Megorskaya. We also expect that there will be a next investment round in the future.

Bezos Expeditions has yet to provide official comments on this investment.