Wildberries founder Tatyana Kim becomes Russia's richest woman with US$8.1 billion fortune
Tatyana Kim, the former English teacher who co-founded e-commerce platform Wildberries, is now Russia's richest woman with an estimated net worth of US$8.1 billion. The company, launched in 2004 from her Moscow apartment, generated US$9 billion in 2024 revenue and serves more than half of Russia's p
Tatyana Kim, the co-founder of e-commerce giant Wildberries, has become Russia's richest woman with an estimated net worth of US$8.1 billion. Born to a Russian family of Korean ethnicity and a former English teacher, Kim launched Wildberries in 2004 with her now ex-husband, IT entrepreneur Vladislav Bakalchuk.
What began as a family business run out of Kim's Moscow apartment, where she sold clothing sourced from European catalogues through an online storefront, has grown into Russia's largest e-commerce platform. The company now has nearly 95,000 pickup points across the country, and more than half of the nation's population makes purchases at least once a month. Wildberries raked in US$9 billion in revenues in 2024, as estimated by Forbes, with unconfirmed 2025 sales reportedly reaching US$15 billion.
Kim envisioned the business catering to women like herself: mothers who have little budget and time to shop. What set Wildberries apart from its rivals at the time was a model that let customers have their orders sent to a pickup point, where they could try on items before deciding whether to buy them. 'At first, I did everything myself, collecting the goods and taking them to customers on the other side of Moscow by subway or bus,' Kim told Bloomberg in 2018.
Kim became the second-ever female billionaire in Russia in 2019, when Forbes listed her among the 10 most notable new billionaires. Despite being often likened to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the soft-spoken mother of seven is a far more private figure who rarely grants interviews. She is said to lead a relatively modest lifestyle, renting instead of owning homes, and rarely seen in expensive jewellery or designer clothes. She has said she buys everything on Wildberries herself.
Kim's rise has not been without major setbacks. As Wildberries grew, tensions between Kim and Bakalchuk over the company's future direction deepened, leading to a 2024 shootout at a Wildberries office, followed by a highly publicised divorce that was finalised the next year. The company has also lost a third of its warehouse capacity and as much as 480 billion rubles (US$5.9 billion) worth of goods in Ukrainian attacks, according to The New York Times, citing Moscow-based e-commerce consultancy Data Insight. Analysts believe that, as a company considered strategic to the Russian economy, Wildberries is unlikely to go bankrupt.
