Updated headline and recast throughout with Yandex’s retraction of statement about Segalovich’s death
MOSCOW, July 25 (RIA Novosti) – Ilya Segalovich, who co-founded search engine Yandex, one of Russia’s most successful companies, is in a coma, Yandex's CEO said Tuesday, contradicting a previous statement by the company that Segalovich was dead.
Yandex announced earlier in the day that Segalovich, 48, had passed away unexpectedly from complications arising from his treatment for cancer.
"We want to clarify an earlier statement that the company put out. We have since learnt that Ilya is in coma and on life support although not showing any brain function. Our thoughts are with him at this time," said Yandex CEO and co-founder Arkady Volozh, Reuters reported.
The confusion over Segalovich’s condition emerged followed a flood of tributes to the internet entrepreneur, by figures including Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
Yandex’s online masthead remained black – a sign of respect for Segalovich – and the press release announcing his death remained available on Yandex’s site even after Yandex said that Segalovich was still on life support.
“Last night Ilya’s family informed us that he had died. In the morning we received the information that Ilya was attached to a life support machine,” Yandex spokesman Ochir Mandzhikov wrote on Twitter. “We are waiting for official information.”
Segalovich was responding well to treatment for cancer and died suddenly, according to the original statement from Yandex.
“I was friends with Ilya since school; we sat at 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 an emotional blog entry on the Yandex website on Tuesday morning.
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.
Yandex is today 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.
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.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences in a message posted on social networking site Vkontake.
“[Segalovich] was a professional of the highest class, with a kind heart and the ability to inspire and care about those who surrounded him. It is a big loss not only for his relatives and friends, but for the whole of the internet industry,” Medvedev wrote.
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 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. Segalovich's second wife was the charity’s director and founder, Maria Yeliseeva, with whom he had several children.
While he always careful to separate his personal and professional positions, Segalovich worked as a volunteer election observer during the 2012 presidential elections, according to an interview he gave to Forbes Magazine.
He also took part in opposition protest marches in Moscow and had donated money to organize elections to the opposition Coordination Council, 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 a blog entry on the Yandex site early Tuesday. "But he has left behind a whole new generation of programmers, a whole school. And his ethical standards are a benchmark for us all.”
