Oleg Shchegolev

Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer Semrush

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Oleg Shchegolev co-founded Semrush and built it over nearly two decades from a small SEO utility into a publicly traded online visibility platform that Adobe acquired for $1.9 billion in 2026. The business rests on an asset that is harder to acquire than it looks: a continuously refreshed index of what ranks where, for whom, across search engines and markets, which lets a marketer see their competitors’ organic and paid position rather than only their own. Shchegolev led the company as chief executive through almost all of that period, including its March 2021 listing on the New York Stock Exchange, and stepped into the Chief Technology Officer role in March 2025 when Bill R. Wagner was appointed CEO. Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush on 28 April 2026, folding the platform into its customer experience business as search-driven discovery gives way to AI-driven brand visibility.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Semrush in 2008 with Dmitri Melnikov and led it as Chief Executive Officer until 2025.
• Built the product from early SEO tools — released as Seodigger and renamed SeoQuake Company in 2007 — into the Semrush platform.
• Took Semrush public on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2021 under the ticker SEMR, with the company reporting $213 million in revenue and more than 82,000 customers at listing.
• Transitioned from CEO to Chief Technology Officer in March 2025 on the appointment of Bill R. Wagner as chief executive.
• Semrush agreed in November 2025 to be acquired by Adobe at $12 per share in cash, a $1.9 billion transaction approved by shareholders in February 2026 and completed on 28 April 2026.

Professional Journey

Shchegolev founded the business that became Semrush in 2008 with Dmitri Melnikov, described in later coverage as a childhood friend. The product that preceded the company had already been circulating: Seodigger, released in the mid-2000s, was a tool for extracting the keywords a domain ranked for, and the company that formed around that work was first called SeoQuake Company, renamed in 2007. The Semrush name followed, with SEM standing for search engine marketing.

What the company was really building was a competitive intelligence database rather than a tool. Rather than reporting on a customer’s own website, Semrush crawled and stored ranking data across domains, which meant a marketer could see where a rival ranked, what they paid for, and what had changed. That is an infrastructure problem — continuous crawling, storage and indexing at scale — and it sat naturally with a technical founder as chief executive.

The founders, Russian nationals, relocated to the United States in 2017, and the company was headquartered in Boston. Semrush went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2021 under the ticker SEMR, reporting $213 million in revenue and more than 82,000 paying customers at the time of listing.

In March 2025 Shchegolev handed the chief executive role to Bill R. Wagner and became Chief Technology Officer, a move that put a career operator in charge of the public company while the founder returned to the technology. Later that year, in November 2025, Adobe agreed to acquire Semrush for $12 per share in cash, valuing it at $1.9 billion. Shareholders approved the deal in February 2026 and Adobe completed it on 28 April 2026, positioning Semrush’s visibility data within Adobe’s customer experience portfolio at a point when marketers were beginning to worry less about ranking in search results and more about appearing in AI-generated answers.

Education

No education could be established for Shchegolev from any source usable under this project’s sourcing rules. A specific university attribution circulates on profile aggregators, but it derives from a source this project does not accept, and no independent corroboration was found.