A new name quietly appeared on the Nasdaq on October 21 and it was Nebius that traded under the ticker NBIS. There was no fanfare for Nebius like the usual glitz and glamour of IPO launches.
Nebius is a reimagined version of Dutch holding company Yandex N.V. that once owned Russian tech giant Yandex. Its shares were frozen and the company faced a delisting threat in 2022 following sanctions due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It underwent a 16-month-long restructuring to survive and had to shed all its Russian assets. It transformed into an AI cloud startup named Nebius and now headquartered in the Netherlands.
This left Nebius as a startup by nature but a public company by necessity. Its main focus now is to sell GPU power “as-a-service” for companies working on AI and machine learning. Building such infrastructure is capital-intensive as Yandex co-founder said that staying public was the fastest way to access the funding needed in this booming tech space.
The re-entry into the stock market has been rocky for the company and its valuation has fluctuated between $3.5 billion and $4.75 billion since trading resumed. Its valuation was once $18 billion in early 2022,
The cloud business of Nebius forms the backbone of its operations and competing with industry titans like AWS as well as smaller startups like CoreWeave. The company is also expanding aggressively equipped with plans of launching a new GPU cluster in Kansas City by 2025 alongside existing facilities in Finland and Paris.
Nebius is not just about cloud computing, but it also owns three other ventures. They are autonomous vehicle company Avride now partnered with Uber, AI data labeling services Toloka and edtech platform offering online coding bootcamps TripleTen. The real bet is on the cloud infrastructure sector even though these businesses add variety.
The story of Nebius is a rare one as an established company was forced to reinvent itself as a startup while navigating public markets. Its journey highlights resilience and adaptability needed to stay afloat in today’s fast-changing tech world.
