No fully confirmed dead Russian-origin RAG startup — Smelter is the closest, and it stays an amber near-match

Asked:

“try to find dead ru origin AI startaps focused in RAG by analysing vacanciec in LI, ODS, Habr, Jabka.work, telegram chats and groups. the company must be alive at jul 2024 and ceased or abondaned by their CTO and CEO now or publicly aquired. do filter out early for Russia or Ukraine based startups. tracking former larg tech (yandex, sber, and others) employees with nlp past might be fruitful”

The screen covers vacancy and status evidence gathered from ODS, Habr Career, hh.ru, LinkedIn-indexed pages, Telegram-indexed pages, company sites, tech press and databases: 22 structured vacancy leads, 16 enriched company-name groups, 3 status events and 1 strict-pass lead. Seven serious candidates were screened; zero satisfy every strict criterion — RAG focus, company-side Russian origin, alive at July 2024, and shutdown or public acquisition — with public proof.

Due-diligence funnel: 26 raw leads narrow to zero confirmations

Each bar is a screening stage; hover for who survives it and why the count falls.

Traffic-light screening matrix: seven candidates, four verdicts

amber — near-match, not confirmed red — rejected on origin or outcome gray — unresolved black — excluded by location screen

verified in sources inferred, not directly proven unresolved fails the criterion

Excluded Russia-based lead: Micord / PAUK

The one hit of the ultra-strict semantic pass is Micord, a Kazan technology company that built PAUK, an LLM-and-retrieval system for the FSB over restricted and public databases; it used FSB briefings compiled January 2024 – June 2025 and reportedly stopped work in fall 2025. It fails the location screen (Russia-based) and is not clearly a venture startup, so it sits outside the qualifying shortlist. Sources: sharij.news, kompromat.press.

What the funnel cannot say alone

Smelter, in Yandex’s Beyond ML portfolio, reportedly ceased operations in August 2024 — but no source proves RAG was its core product, dates July 2024 activity independently, or shows CEO/CTO abandonment. tech.news.am

Carbon is the textbook control: an exact RAG company acquired by Perplexity on 18 December 2024 with its managed API later wound down — yet founders Derek Tu and Aditya Chempakasseril show no Russian or Russian-big-tech link in the gathered evidence. techcrunch.com

Anecdote fits the profile — cofounder Pavel Kochetkov is ex-Mail.ru and the product reads knowledge bases — but it rebranded to Clarity and raised $12M in September 2025, so it is neither dead nor acquired. businesscloud.co.uk

Tavily is a false positive by construction: the Yandex connection belongs to the acquirer, Nebius Group, while the Israeli target itself kept shipping (Token Factory, November 2024). asted.cloud

Name collisions nearly poison the screen: Anecdotes (Israeli GRC), Anecdote Candles, and Carbon Robotics all surfaced in enrichment and had to be split off before verdicts. crunchbase.com

Vacancy leads worth keeping on the watchlist

Deduplicated postings from the ODS pass tied to the screened startups. A vacancy proves hiring intent only — never Russian origin or shutdown.

Company	Role posted	Location noted	Source

Method: open-web investigation across LinkedIn-indexed pages, ODS, Habr Career, hh.ru, Jabka.work terms, Telegram-indexed pages, company sites, tech press and databases; individual search passes returned roughly 1,000–2,700 URL-deduplicated results. Inputs: 22 structured vacancy rows, 16 enriched company-name groups, 3 status-event rows, 1 strict-pass lead. Verdicts distinguish verified, inferred, unresolved and failing facts; irrelevant corporate vacancies (banks, research centres) were cut for space. Private LinkedIn and Telegram content is not fully indexed, so absence of evidence here is not proof that no such startup exists.

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