“Yandex” presented the weather platform

Yandex launched a platform that allows businesses to receive weather forecast data and related recommendations. The company has already developed a similar platform under the Meteum brand abroad, but did not represent it on the Russian market. Among the potential customers of the new platform, Yandex names farmers. Market participants recognize the relevance of the service, but are not sure about the adequacy of the recommendations received in it.

The Yandex Weather service has launched a business platform in Russia that allows companies to receive weather data, forecasts and related recommendations, the company told Kommersant. The platform is designed for use in agriculture, retail and logistics and takes into account data from ground weather stations, radars and satellites along with user messages. Previously, Yandex provided Russian companies only with automated access directly to weather data, without recommendations. “The launch of the platform is a natural continuation of the work of Yandex Weather with partners,” the company added.

Kommersant discovered that the demo version of the service is located on the website of Meteum, an already existing weather platform from Yandex, which is presented only in foreign markets.

The Meteum service was also promoted in Latin America (see “Kommersant” dated July 29, 2022A). The legal address of Meteum, according to the website, is the same as the legal address of the Beyond AI holding in Armenia.

About emergence of this structure which “Yandex” called “one of internal experiments of the company”, in December, 2022 reported RTVI; then Meteum was not among the services related to Beyond AI. Yandex did not answer the question of how the new service would compare with other structures, nor did they answer the question of Meteum’s involvement in Beyond AI.

Even before the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, some Yandex services began to use different brands in Russia and abroad. In July 2023, against the backdrop of the upcoming division of Russian and foreign assets of Yandex, the company launched the Yandex Jobs crowdsourcing service in the Russian Federation and announced its intention to rebuild the existing Toloka service for the foreign market (see “Kommersant” dated July 26).

The parent structure of Yandex, the Dutch Yandex NV, expressed its intention to independently develop the data markup business, which includes Toloka. In the case of weather platforms, this is not the case, according to a Kommersant source close to one of the parties to the asset division deal:

“The Meteum service will not go to the foreign part of the company, which will separate from the Russian one during the deal.”

The development of Yandex, unlike specialized farm management systems (FMS – Farm Management System), is focused only on the weather, “but it aggregates information from a large number of sources, including user messages,” notes the CEO of Pole.rf Evgeny Belov. He called it a “big plus” for agricultural producers, stressing that there are no other similar domestic developments yet. Foreign companies have not yet provided such services in the Russian Federation, Dmitry Rylko, director general of the Institute for Agricultural Market Studies, added. The appearance of the platform from Yandex, according to him, is relevant, but the demand for it “will depend on the content and cost.”

Not only weather information is important for farmers, but also the degree of development of industry scenarios, said farmer Nikita Tokmakov, who got acquainted with the demo version of the platform: “The service allows, in particular, to calculate the risks of adverse scenarios by crops. It is likely that Yandex collaborated with someone to obtain this data, or calculated it on its own, so it is interesting how it is adapted to Russian realities.” Dedicated FMS systems, the farmer added, “on the contrary, raise questions about the accuracy of weather forecasts.”

Yuri Litvinenko