Investors in AI cloud startup Nebius Group (NBIS) have seen the stock rise 26.4% over the past week, driven by new backing from Jeff Bezos.
The Amsterdam-based company announced last week that the Amazon founder had become a lead investor in Nebius’ AI data solutions business Toloka.
The investment is being made through Bezos Expedition, which is the investment arm of Jeff Bezos.
In addition to Bezos, Toloka has also gotten an investment from Shopify CTO Mikhail Parakhin.
Terms of the investments were not disclosed.
"The demand for world-class AI data expertise is more urgent than ever,” Parakhin said in a statement.
“Toloka is uniquely positioned to meet this need, distinguished by its excellent engineering, strong research reputation, and proven ability to blend ML expertise with managing humans at scale and with scientific rigor.”
Parakhin will serve as the chairman of Toloka’s newly formed board of directors, while company CEO Olga Megorskaya will continue to lead the executive management team.
“Attracting world-class strategic investors like Jeff and Mikhail is a strong endorsement of the quality of Toloka’s business and leadership,” Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh said in a statement.
“As enthusiastic backers of Olga and the outstanding Toloka team since day one, we believe this is the best way for Toloka to accelerate its growth and capitalize on the enormous opportunities of the AI revolution.”
Nebius is maintaining a “significant majority economic stake” in Toloka, but it is relinquishing majority voting control of it.
This will allow Toloka to have “greater independence and governance flexibility, and also enabling the Nebius management team to increase its focus on the core AI infrastructure business.”
Bezos’ backing allows Toloka to ‘significantly scale’
Toloka’s origins were in large-scale crowd-sourced data labeling and its expertise spans the AI development lifecycle, including safety evaluation and red teaming.
Its enterprise clients include Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, poolside, Recraft and Shopify.
Megorskaya said in a statement that the new investments “marks a pivotal moment” for Toloka and will allow the company to “signicantly scale” its technology.
“As AI becomes increasingly integrated into global workflows, Toloka stands ready to power the next generation of solutions that intelligently combine human judgment with AI efficiency, setting new standards for what's possible in this rapidly evolving ecosystem,” he said.
Nvidia-backed Nebius was spun off from Yandex, considered the “Google of Russia,” after Volozh and other members of the leadership team left the company in opposition to Russia’s war with Ukraine.
In an interview at Nvidia’s GTC Conference in March, Roman Chernin, chief business officer for Nebius, said the company’s role in the AI ecosystem is to build “the unsexiest part of the sexiest industry.”
“Our customers are doing a great job to research and develop the new products, and everyone needs the fuel for that,” he said. “And actually what we provide is the fuel.”
Chernin also noted in the interview that Nebius had recently expanded its company into the U.S.
Its main rival in the space is buzzy AI architecture company CoreWeave, which is also backed by Nvidia.
Nebius stock is up 29.2% year-to-date. The company is scheduled to report its first-quarter earnings on May 20.
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