Yandex says it is spinning out its self-driving car unit from its Uber joint venture, buying out some of Uber's share, and investing $150M into the new company
Self-driving cars are still many years away from becoming a ubiquitous reality, but today one of the bigger efforts to build …
Context & Ripple Effects
The spin-out untangles the autonomous arm of the business Yandex and Uber fused when they merged their Russian ride-sharing operations into a $3.7B joint venture in 2017, with Yandex holding 59.3% and Uber 36.6%. Self-driving was always the awkward piece inside that deal: Yandex debuted its first prototype months before the merger closed and put two cars into a free robotaxi trial in Innopolis by 2018.
By carving the unit out and putting in $150M of its own money, Yandex is treating autonomy as core infrastructure for its ride-hailing business rather than a shared side bet — building on the Hyundai partnership it struck in 2019 for software and hardware development.
First-order effects
- Uber's exposure to the venture shrinks to a minority position as Yandex buys out part of its share, ending joint governance over a program Yandex has been operating since the Innopolis autonomous ride-hailing trial.
- Yandex gains sole strategic control and commits fresh $150M capital, decoupling the AV roadmap's pace from Uber's priorities.
Second-order effects
- The Hyundai hardware-and-software partnership now negotiates with a single-owner company instead of a two-parent JV, simplifying commercial terms but concentrating counterparty risk on Yandex's balance sheet.
- Uber retains a residual stake in an asset it no longer steers, effectively converting an operational commitment into a passive financial holding it can later exit.
Third-order effects
- The move fits a broader unwinding of the 2017-era mega-JVs: once autonomy matured from experiment to competitive necessity, shared ownership became a liability, pushing capital-intensive AV programs toward single-operator control.
- If the pattern holds, ride-hailing incumbents will increasingly own their autonomy stacks outright, with partners like Hyundai supplying components under arms-length deals rather than equity entanglements.
The trend: The ride-hailing joint ventures struck in 2017 are progressively unwinding, with each parent pulling strategically critical assets like self-driving back under sole ownership as autonomy turns from shared bet to core capability.