Uber and Grubhub have both severed ties with Russian technology giant Yandex.
When war between Ukraine and Russia broke out, Uber Technologies removed three of its executives from the board of a joint venture between Uber and Yandex. Uber had previously started to divest itself from several joint ventures with Yandex, including Yandex.Eats, Yandex.Lavka and Yandex. Delivery and announced it would speed up plans to divest itself. The ventures created riding-sharing and delivery businesses in Russia and several neighboring countries.
“We are actively looking for opportunities to accelerate the sale of our remaining holdings and, in the meantime, will remove our executives from the board of the joint venture,” a spokesperson for Uber told Reuters.
Grubhub announced Thursday it would no longer continue a partnership with Yandex that operated autonomous delivery robots on The Ohio State University and the University of Arizona campuses. Grubhub said it was doing 1,000 deliveries a day between the two campuses.
A spokesperson for Yandex was disappointed in Grubhub’s decision.
“It is a real shame that we can’t continue with this great project we embarked on in the U.S. campus space with Grubhub as we all know it was having a really positive impact to the student body,” Toby Snuggs said.
Besides the separation from the two firms, the economic sanctions from the war have also created financial challenges for the company. Yandex is incorporated in The Netherlands but its corporate headquarters and the majority of its workforce are located in Russia. The company announced in early March that it might not be able to make payments on its debt because of the restrictions on banking placed against Russia.
“The Yandex group as a whole does not currently have sufficient resources to redeem the Notes in full,” the company said in a statement.
The company said it is exploring various funding options and continued: “In the event that we were prevented from distributing additional funds from our Russian subsidiaries to our Dutch parent company, Yandex would not have sufficient resources to redeem a majority of the Notes.”
