Yandex bought the charger rental service “Take Charge!”

Charger rental will appear in the Yandex Go application in the first quarter of next year.

The head of the new management will be Yandex Go COO Artem Molchanov, under whose leadership the former “Take Charge!” team will work. The transaction amount is not disclosed.

When developing the service, Yandex will focus on simplifying the movement of people around the city and expand the rental infrastructure, increasing the number of charging stations and vehicles in the places of greatest demand. The company’s proprietary technology for forecasting demand and traffic flows helps identify those locations.

Yandex will invest more than 2 billion rubles in the service over the next two years, the press release notes.

“The service grows exponentially every year: now we have 40 thousand charging stations and 6 million users, by the end of the year we hope to double income. We recently attracted investments, which we immediately used to scale,” commented the founder of “Take Charge!” about the agreement. Kirill Kulakov. The businessman added that he hopes to accelerate the growth of the service’s audience after the transaction with the help of Yandex’s experience and resources.

“Take charge!” More than 50,000 people use it daily, according to the company’s website. The service was launched in 2018 and consists of the installation of compact charging stations with powerbanks, which can be rented on a short-term basis through the application.

Yandex’s plans to buy Take Charge became known in September. The founder of the First Institute of Financial and Investment Technologies, Alexey Primak, told Kommersant that the value of this business ranges from 1.7 to 3.3 billion rubles.