Yuri Milner

Yuri founded Mail.ru Group in 1999 and under his leadership, it became one of Europe’s leading internet companies. He took that business public in 2010 and founded DST Global to focus on global internet investments. DST Global became one of the world’s leading technology investors and its portfolio has included some of the world’s most prominent internet companies, such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Spotify, Alibaba, JD, and others. Yuri lives in Silicon Valley with his family.

Yuri graduated in 1985 with an advanced degree in theoretical physics and subsequently conducted research in quantum field theory. Yuri and his wife Julia, together with Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, launched the Breakthrough Prizes – the world’s largest scientific awards, honoring important, primarily recent, achievements in Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences, and Mathematics. In July 2015, together with Stephen Hawking, Yuri launched the $100 million Breakthrough Listen initiative to reinvigorate the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the Universe, and in April 2016 they launched Breakthrough Starshot – a $100 million research and engineering program seeking to develop a technology for interstellar travel.