Yandex just poached the man behind Perplexity's AI browser Comet

Dmitry Golubnichiy, who spent the last year and a half running browser development at Perplexity and helped build its Comet browser, has moved to Yandex. RBC spotted the change on his LinkedIn profile, and Yandex confirmed the hire.

At Yandex he now leads product development for Alice AI for business. According to Sergey Yudin, the CTO of that unit, Golubnichiy will focus on making Alice handle multi-step tasks properly, protect corporate data and keep the AI's actions under control. The team plans to wire the assistant into Yandex 360, the Yandex browser and corporate services, turning it into a work tool rather than just a chatbot.

Comet is Perplexity's browser with a built-in AI assistant, launched in July 2025. It reads websites, looks things up, fills in forms, compares products and works across several open tabs on the user's behalf. Those are exactly the agent skills Yandex now wants from Alice.

He is no stranger to Yandex: he spent about 12 years there building its browser, then more than four years as CTO of the startup Sidekick, which Perplexity bought in May 2025. That is how he ended up on Comet.

Usually talent flows from Russia to American AI companies. This time it went the other way. Now we will see whether Alice can do what Comet does.