Yuri Milner

Yuri Milner is co-founder and current president of the Russian investment fund “DST” specializing in Internet.

He studied physics at Moscow University until 1985, and then became a researcher at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1985 to 1989. In 1990, he obtained permission to leave the country in order to study in the United States. He went to the Wharton School of Economics in the University of Pennsylvania, where he was graduated in 1992 and got a MBA.

He came back to Russia in 1996 after a passage at the World Bank in Washington, where he was responsible of the financial sector’s development in Russia
For two years, he learns the management in one of the bank of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian oligarch imprisoned since 2004.

He began investing in Internet since 1999. He became a shareholder in Mail.ru, an e-mail service that he transformed into a portal. From 2001 to 2003, he was CEO of Mail ru. IHis strategy and ambition pay, Mail.ru is the biggest Russian website. He still is on the board of Mail.ru.

He met Gregory Finger, another Russian investor who was also interested in internet.
Together they founded in 2005, Digital Sky Technologies. This investment company has taken shares in Internet companies in Russia then in former countries of USSR and Eastern Europe.

Between 2005 and 2009, DST invests over a billion dollars in more than thirty companies and got the support of Russia, China and occidental countries. In June 2009, DST invests $ 200 million in the site of Mark Zuckerberg, the social network Facebook.

Today, Yuri Milner has interests in 25 Internet companies, including 10 considered as the biggest websites. It is very difficult to know all his shares, but is possible to cite Mail.ru, the social network Vkontakte and the reunion website Odnoklassniki.