Toloka

Initially a part of the Russian technology enterprise Yandex, Toloka has since become a standalone entity. Following a significant corporate restructuring in 2023 and 2024, Yandex's Russian assets were sold, and its international divisions, including Toloka, were spun off into the newly formed, Netherlands-based Nebius Group. This separation has allowed Toloka to operate with greater independence and attract international investment. A major milestone occurred in May 2025, when the company secured a $72 million funding round led by Jeff Bezos's investment firm, Bezos Expeditions. As part of this investment, Mikhail Parakhin, the CTO of Shopify, joined Toloka's Board of Directors as Chairman.

The firm's business model is centered around its platform, which connects AI developers with a global network of over 200,000 contributors, or "Tolokers," across more than 100 countries. These contributors perform a variety of microtasks—such as data annotation, content moderation, and sentiment analysis—that are critical for training, evaluating, and refining AI models. Toloka serves a client base of enterprise-level technology companies, including prominent names like Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Shopify, who use the platform to source high-quality, human-verified data for their AI projects. Revenue is generated by providing these data solutions to businesses. The platform has evolved from general crowdsourcing to offering specialized services, including PhD-level domain expertise for large language model (LLM) development and virtual environments for testing AI agents. Its services cover dataset creation, annotation, model evaluation, and safety testing through red-teaming.