Some companies begin with a detailed business plan, funding targets and an ambitious vision of the market they want to dominate.
Skroutz did not.
When George Chatzigeorgiou began working on the first version of Skroutz in 2005, he has said that he did not initially think of it as the beginning of a major company. He was a programmer with a regular job, experimenting in his spare time with a simple idea: make it easier for consumers to find and compare prices across Greek online stores.
More than two decades later, that side project has become Greece’s leading online marketplace. Skroutz today connects approximately 2.5 million active users with around 9,000 merchants and more than 26 million products, while the business has expanded far beyond product search into proprietary logistics, fulfilment, payments, subscriptions and retail media.
And 2026 opened another major chapter. Blackstone agreed to acquire a majority stake from CVC and part of the founders’ holdings, while the founders will retain an interest and continue leading the company. George Chatzigeorgiou remains CEO. Greece’s Competition Commission approved Blackstone’s acquisition of sole control on July 30, 2026.
The story is therefore no longer simply about how a Greek price-comparison website became successful.
It is about something much larger: how a technology company gradually took control of more and more layers of the e-commerce experience until it became an integrated commerce platform.
Market Insiders examines the entrepreneurial journey of George Chatzigeorgiou, the transformation of Skroutz from search engine to marketplace, the role of CVC and Blackstone and why the company’s next major challenge may be turning a dominant Greek position into a broader Southeast European growth story.
Who Is George Chatzigeorgiou?
George Chatzigeorgiou is the President, CEO and Co-Founder of Skroutz.
He studied Electrical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. Although his original interests included hardware, his professional career moved strongly toward software. Before Skroutz developed into a full-time business, he worked independently as a programmer and was responsible for much of the early technical development of the platform and its search engine.
He founded Skroutz alongside Vasilis Dimou and Giorgos Avgoustidis in 2005. The company itself describes the three founders as friends brought together by an enthusiasm for computing and technology rather than by a grand initial plan to build one of Greece’s largest technology businesses.
That detail is important because it helps explain much of the company’s later culture.
Skroutz was not originally built around an elaborate corporate theory of e-commerce.
It was built around a technical problem.
How can software make shopping easier?
That question would remain relevant long after price comparison stopped being the company’s main product.
Skroutz Started as a Hobby
The earliest version of Skroutz was remarkably simple compared with the company that exists today.
Chatzigeorgiou created a basic crawler — essentially a small bot — capable of visiting online stores, collecting product information and prices and displaying them through a searchable webpage. As traffic grew, the original system repeatedly reached its limits and had to be rebuilt.
The first version focused heavily on computer and electronics shops, including retailers around Athens’ Stournari Street, then one of the city’s best-known technology shopping areas. Chatzigeorgiou has recalled beginning with just a handful of stores and contacting merchants by email to ask whether they wanted to appear on the platform.
There was no enormous launch.
No international investor.
No carefully engineered startup narrative.
The company grew because users found the tool useful.
That may be the simplest explanation of why the original idea worked: it reduced the amount of effort necessary to answer one very practical consumer question.
Where can I buy this product, and at what price?
The First Business Model Was Traffic
In its earliest phase, Skroutz did not sell products itself.
Its value to merchants was traffic.
Consumers arrived at Skroutz while researching products and prices, then moved to participating online stores to complete purchases.
The company formalized that relationship through a CPC — cost-per-click — commercial model in 2007. By 2009, the platform had exceeded 500 merchants and 300,000 products.
For retailers, appearing on Skroutz could solve a visibility problem. A smaller store did not necessarily need the marketing reach of a major retailer if it could appear beside larger competitors at exactly the moment a consumer was comparing products.
That model helped Skroutz become deeply embedded in Greek e-commerce.
But it also created a limitation.
Skroutz could help a consumer decide where to shop.
It did not control what happened after the consumer left.
The Critical Shift: From Comparison Engine to Marketplace
The most important strategic transformation began when Skroutz stopped thinking of itself primarily as a source of traffic.
In 2016, Skroutz introduced its marketplace model, allowing customers to complete purchases through the platform rather than simply clicking through to another store.
This changed the economics of the company.
A price-comparison engine influences discovery.
A marketplace participates directly in the transaction.
That means considerably greater responsibility.
The platform must manage payments, ordering, returns, merchant reliability and customer expectations.
But it also gains something strategically valuable:
control over much more of the customer journey.
The shift from price comparison to marketplace would eventually become the foundation on which almost every subsequent Skroutz service was built.
The Product Was No Longer Just Search
This distinction is easy to underestimate.
As a search and comparison platform, Skroutz’s primary job was helping a user find information.
As a marketplace, its job increasingly became helping the user complete the entire purchase confidently.
That means the relevant questions changed.
Will the payment work?
Will the product arrive on time?
What happens if it is wrong?
Can it be returned easily?
Can the merchant fulfil the order?
Can delivery be made faster?
Can the customer trust the platform enough to shop there repeatedly?
The company had moved into a much more difficult business.
But it had also entered a business with considerably more strategic depth.
2020 and the CVC Chapter
Another major turning point came in 2020, when CVC Capital Partners entered Skroutz as a strategic investor.
The company itself describes the CVC partnership as a pivotal moment that enabled further development of new services and accelerated the transformation of the business.
Media reporting has placed CVC’s stake at around 45%, with Skroutz valued at approximately €250 million at the time of the 2020 investment. Those figures were not part of the original public announcement and should therefore be understood as reported transaction estimates.
What happened after CVC entered is more important than the exact initial valuation.
Skroutz began investing heavily in infrastructure around the marketplace.
Delivery.
Warehousing.
Payments.
Subscriptions.
International expansion.
The company was moving further away from being a website that organized products and closer to becoming the infrastructure through which an online purchase could happen from beginning to end.
Owning the Last Mile
A marketplace can provide an excellent website and still lose control of the customer experience once an order leaves the merchant.
Late delivery is experienced by the customer as a bad purchase.
The consumer may not particularly care which company caused the delay.
This is why logistics became strategically important.
In April 2021, Skroutz acquired SendX and developed its proprietary courier operation, Skroutz Last Mile. The company subsequently expanded its own delivery network, vehicles and Skroutz Point pickup infrastructure.
The logic is clear.
If delivery determines customer satisfaction, delivery cannot always remain somebody else’s problem.
Skroutz was beginning to vertically integrate.
The Locker Became Part of the Product
The expansion of Skroutz Points illustrates how deeply logistics became integrated into the shopping experience.
By October 2025, Skroutz reported 1,962 Skroutz Points with more than 58,000 lockers across 70 cities in Greece and Cyprus, with further expansion planned.
The importance of lockers became even clearer in 2026.
During the Easter period, 54% of orders across Greece and Cyprus were delivered through Skroutz Points, while Skroutz Last Mile handled 88% of total order volume.
This matters because the marketplace is no longer simply influencing which product someone buys.
It is also influencing where and how that product physically reaches them.
The digital platform has developed physical infrastructure around itself.
Fulfilled by Skroutz Changed the Merchant Side
Logistics integration did not stop with the final delivery.
In 2022, Skroutz launched Fulfilled by Skroutz, allowing merchants to store products in Skroutz warehouses while the company manages picking, packaging, shipping and returns.
This solves a different problem.
Smaller e-commerce businesses may have competitive products but struggle with warehouse operations and delivery speed.
Fulfilment allows them to outsource much of that complexity.
For Skroutz, however, the strategic advantage goes deeper.
The more control the platform has over fulfilment, the more consistently it can deliver the customer experience it wants to promise.
During Easter 2026, the volume handled through FBS more than doubled year-on-year, while 62% of FBS shipments nationwide were delivered the next day and the figure reached 90% in Attica.
Again, Skroutz had taken another part of the purchasing journey inside its own ecosystem.
From Marketplace to Logistics Infrastructure
This progression illustrates an important business principle.
Marketplaces initially benefit from being asset-light.
They connect supply and demand without owning every product being sold.
But once they become large enough, the limitations of external infrastructure can become their own limitations.
Skroutz responded by selectively adding infrastructure around the marketplace.
It did not start buying all the products it lists.
Instead, it built control around the transaction.
Payment.
Warehousing.
Delivery.
Returns.
That is a very different form of vertical integration from traditional retail.
Payments Became the Next Layer
The same logic eventually reached payments.
Skroutz fully acquired EveryPay in 2022, bringing payment infrastructure further inside the group. In 2024, EveryPay obtained an Electronic Money Institution licence, allowing it to expand into products including Skroutz Wallet and Corporate Wallet.
This pushed Skroutz into an area that once would have seemed far removed from a price-comparison website.
Fintech.
But strategically, the move is consistent.
Payments sit at one of the most critical points of an e-commerce transaction. Faster checkout, payment reliability, wallets, BNPL and merchant settlement can all influence both conversion and user loyalty.
The more of that infrastructure a marketplace controls, the more independently it can design the experience.
Skroutz Plus Turned Shopping Into a Membership Relationship
Another major change came from Skroutz Plus.
A marketplace traditionally waits for consumers to return when they need another product.
A subscription creates a more explicit relationship.
By June 2026, Skroutz Plus had reached approximately 260,000 members, with annual membership growth of 21%.
The purchasing behavior of those users demonstrates why the service matters commercially.
In 2025, approximately 230,000 active Plus subscribers were responsible for 44% of total orders and 43% of annual revenue, according to company data.
That is a powerful concentration of activity.
The platform is no longer asking only:
“How do we get someone to make a purchase?”
It is asking:
“How do we become the place they begin shopping again and again?”
Loyalty Changes Marketplace Economics
Repeat customers are extremely valuable in e-commerce.
Acquiring demand repeatedly through paid marketing can become expensive. A subscription can increase purchase frequency while making it psychologically easier for users to default to the same platform.
This is particularly important when delivery benefits are involved.
Once a customer has already paid for a subscription, searching elsewhere may create additional perceived friction.
Skroutz Plus therefore does more than produce subscription revenue.
It can strengthen the marketplace’s habit loop.
The service moved even further in 2026 through a strategic partnership with Wolt, broadening the proposition beyond traditional marketplace purchases.
This suggests that loyalty itself is becoming a product.
From Search Advertising to Retail Media
Skroutz has also expanded into retail media, monetizing the enormous amount of purchase intent generated inside the marketplace.
This is a natural evolution.
A user searching for headphones on Skroutz is not simply browsing the internet.
They may be very close to buying headphones.
That makes the marketplace particularly valuable advertising real estate for brands.
Skroutz now offers sponsored products, category sponsorships, brand pages, video advertising and creator-led native content. The company says its advertising environment reaches more than seven million registered users and allows brands to communicate with consumers near the point of purchase.
This adds another revenue stream without requiring Skroutz to own the brands or products themselves.
The same marketplace produces transactions and advertising inventory.
One Platform, Multiple Economies
By this point, the transformation becomes easier to see.
Skroutz participates in several different economic layers around the same purchase:
Marketplace: connect merchants and customers.
Payments: process and facilitate transactions.
Fulfilment: store and prepare inventory.
Last mile: deliver the parcel.
Subscription: increase loyalty and frequency.
Fintech: add wallets and payment products.
Retail media: monetize purchase intent.
That is why describing modern Skroutz simply as an “e-commerce website” understates what the company has become.
The platform is increasingly an e-commerce operating system around both consumer and merchant activity.
The Merchants Are as Important as the Users
Marketplace growth cannot come only from customer demand.
Supply needs to remain attractive too.
Skroutz currently works with approximately 9,000 merchants, according to the 2026 Blackstone transaction announcement.
For those businesses, the value proposition has expanded considerably from the early CPC days.
A merchant can gain access to consumers, marketplace transactions, warehousing, shipping, payments, advertising and international demand through different parts of the ecosystem.
This creates a deeper relationship than simply paying for traffic.
It can also make the platform more difficult to replace.
The more operational functions a business performs through Skroutz, the more embedded the marketplace becomes in that merchant’s commercial infrastructure.
Marketplaces Grow Through Trust
This connects naturally with another founder story we have already explored.
Read also on Targeted.gr: “Eleftheria Zourou: How One Frustrating Doctor Search Became an International Healthtech Success Story” examining how doctoranytime built a marketplace around verified information, reviews and trust in one of the most sensitive consumer decisions.
Skroutz and doctoranytime operate in completely different industries, but both demonstrate a fundamental marketplace principle.
More supply alone is not enough.
A platform becomes valuable when users believe they can make a decision confidently inside it.
For Skroutz, reviews, merchant reliability, secure payments, delivery guarantees and returns all contribute to that trust.
For doctoranytime, the mechanisms are different.
The underlying problem is remarkably similar.
The Blackstone Deal Marks Another Major Chapter
On May 11, 2026, Blackstone announced a definitive agreement to acquire a majority stake in Skroutz from CVC.
The founders are selling part of their holdings but retaining equity and continuing to lead the company, with George Chatzigeorgiou remaining CEO.
In July, Greece’s Competition Commission unanimously approved the acquisition of sole control by Blackstone, concluding that the transaction did not raise serious competition concerns in the relevant markets.
The deal is significant for several reasons.
CVC entered when Skroutz was beginning a much deeper transformation toward marketplace infrastructure.
Blackstone arrives when many of those building blocks already exist.
The next phase is therefore less about proving that Skroutz can become a full marketplace.
It already has.
The next question is how far that platform can travel beyond Greece.
From a €250M Reported Valuation to Around €650M
The financial trajectory illustrates how much the business changed during the CVC years.
Kathimerini reported that CVC entered Skroutz in 2020 at an estimated valuation of approximately €250 million. Media reports surrounding the 2026 Blackstone transaction placed the newer valuation in the region of €635–650 million. Neither figure should be treated as a publicly disclosed transaction price from the companies themselves, but they provide an indication of the scale at which the business has been discussed.
More important than the valuation increase is what happened operationally between the two transactions.
During those years Skroutz added proprietary logistics, fulfilment, fintech infrastructure, subscriptions and additional monetization channels.
In other words, Blackstone is not acquiring the same company CVC invested in during 2020.
It is acquiring a much more vertically integrated platform.
The Southeast Europe Opportunity
International expansion is now becoming increasingly central to the story.
Skroutz established a presence in Cyprus and has more recently expanded into Romania and Bulgaria, with the company and Blackstone explicitly identifying Southeast Europe as a major future growth opportunity.
This is an important strategic shift.
For years, Skroutz was a hugely successful Greek technology company.
The next ambition is to become a regional commerce platform.
Those are not the same challenge.
Dominance at home does not guarantee product-market fit abroad.
Different countries have different logistics networks, consumer habits, payment preferences, merchant structures and competitors.
The infrastructure Skroutz built in Greece may provide an advantage.
It will still need to be adapted.
Why Cyprus Matters
Cyprus has already become a useful test of that international model.
Skroutz introduced local Skroutz Points and Skroutz Last Mile infrastructure there, while in July 2026 it launched Skroutz Plus for Cypriot consumers.
This is strategically more meaningful than simply shipping Greek products internationally.
The company is beginning to reproduce elements of the full ecosystem outside Greece.
Marketplace.
Delivery.
Lockers.
Membership.
Merchant tools.
That is closer to building another local market than simply serving export orders.
2026 Shows the Platform Is Still Growing at Home
International expansion is happening while the Greek marketplace continues to record growth.
Skroutz reported a 21% increase in total orders during 2025 compared with 2024.
During the 2026 summer sales period, order volume in Greece increased another 30% year-on-year, while GMV from discounted purchases rose 11%.
These are company-reported marketplace metrics rather than audited group financial statements, but they show that international ambition is not emerging because the domestic platform has stopped growing.
The challenge is more demanding:
continue strengthening Greece while building the next geography.
George Chatzigeorgiou and the Culture of Building
One of the interesting aspects of Chatzigeorgiou’s leadership profile is that he has retained a strong association with technology even as the organization became significantly larger.
The SEV biography describes him as continuing to be an active programmer despite his CEO role, while Skroutz’s own internal content frequently presents him through a culture of experimentation, ambitious goals and technical curiosity.
That background may help explain the way Skroutz has expanded.
The company rarely appears to treat its original product as finished.
Price comparison became marketplace.
Marketplace became delivery.
Delivery became fulfilment.
Payments became fintech.
Search became recommendations, feeds and retail media.
The product keeps expanding outward around the original consumer problem.
Twenty Years of Failing
There is another useful detail in how Chatzigeorgiou describes the company’s development.
At the Doers Summit, his keynote was titled “20 Years of Failing”, focusing on mistakes, setbacks and unexpected turns throughout the company’s history.
That framing offers a more realistic interpretation of Skroutz’s growth.
The company did not begin in 2005 with a roadmap showing:
2021: courier network.
2022: warehouses.
2024: fintech.
2026: Blackstone.
The business evolved by repeatedly discovering new bottlenecks in the shopping experience.
Each time one was solved, another became visible.
This is what makes the story more useful than a conventional founder mythology.
The final platform looks deliberate.
The journey that created it was far more iterative.
The Biggest Transformation Was From Website to Infrastructure
Skroutz’s success is often described through its consumer familiarity.
Almost every Greek online shopper recognizes the brand.
But the more important strategic transformation may be happening underneath that familiarity.
A website can be replaced by another website.
Infrastructure is more difficult to replace.
If merchants use Skroutz for demand generation, warehousing, fulfilment and payments, while customers use it for product discovery, transaction, delivery, lockers, returns, financing and loyalty benefits, the relationship becomes significantly deeper on both sides.
That creates network effects that go beyond traffic.
The platform does not simply bring buyers and sellers together.
It increasingly operates the environment in which their transaction happens.
Blackstone Is Betting on the Next Skroutz
Blackstone’s arrival therefore marks an interesting transition.
The investor is not backing an unknown Greek startup.
It is backing a mature market leader with an established brand and significant infrastructure, but one that still has a major geographic expansion opportunity ahead.
Blackstone specifically highlighted digital consumer platforms, e-commerce penetration and Skroutz’s potential across Greece and Southeast Europe when announcing the transaction.
For Chatzigeorgiou and his co-founders, this creates a very different founder challenge from the one they faced in 2005.
The early challenge was:
Can we build something people want?
The next challenge is:
Can what we built in Greece become a repeatable regional model?
Why the George Chatzigeorgiou Story Stands Out
Many successful digital companies become trapped by the product that originally made them successful.
Skroutz did the opposite.
It repeatedly moved into areas that made the company more operationally complicated.
Running a price-comparison website is simpler than running a marketplace.
Running a marketplace is simpler than running logistics.
Logistics is simpler without warehouses.
A technology marketplace is simpler without regulated financial infrastructure.
Yet each additional layer gave Skroutz greater control over the experience it was trying to improve.
That is the central business story behind George Chatzigeorgiou and Skroutz.
The company did not become larger simply by attracting more website traffic.
It became larger by taking responsibility for more of the transaction.
The Next Chapter for George Chatzigeorgiou and Skroutz
Twenty-one years after its launch, Skroutz is entering another transformation.
The platform already offers more than 26 million products from approximately 9,000 merchants to around 2.5 million active users. It controls significant parts of its own logistics network, operates fulfilment infrastructure, owns a licensed fintech subsidiary and is developing a retail media business.
At the same time, growth is increasingly moving beyond Greece.
Cyprus is becoming a deeper local operation.
Romania and Bulgaria represent the next stage of Southeast European expansion.
Blackstone brings the capital and marketplace investment experience for another growth phase.
And the founders remain involved.
That final detail matters.
The Blackstone transaction is not currently presented as the conclusion of the founder story. George Chatzigeorgiou is staying as CEO, while the founders retain an equity stake and continue leading the business.
So perhaps the most interesting chapter of Skroutz is not the story of how three technology enthusiasts built Greece’s best-known e-commerce marketplace.
It is what happens after that achievement.
Can a platform born from a simple Greek price-comparison bot evolve into one of Southeast Europe’s defining commerce infrastructures?
That is now the challenge facing George Chatzigeorgiou and Skroutz.
And after more than two decades of repeatedly becoming a different company from the one it was before, betting against another transformation would ignore the central lesson of its history:
Skroutz has rarely stood still long enough to remain only one thing.
Frequently Asked Questions About George Chatzigeorgiou and Skroutz
Who is George Chatzigeorgiou?
George Chatzigeorgiou is the President, CEO and one of the three co-founders of Skroutz. He has a background in electrical engineering and software development and created the first version of Skroutz in 2005.
Who founded Skroutz?
Skroutz was founded in 2005 by George Chatzigeorgiou, Vasilis Dimou and Giorgos Avgoustidis.
How did Skroutz start?
Skroutz began as a hobby project designed to make it easier to compare product prices across Greek online stores. Its early technology used a crawler to collect product and pricing information from retailers.
When did Skroutz become a marketplace?
Skroutz introduced its marketplace model in 2016, moving beyond price comparison toward a unified purchasing experience.
How many users does Skroutz have?
The May 2026 Blackstone transaction announcement described Skroutz as serving approximately 2.5 million active users.
How many products and merchants are on Skroutz?
The same 2026 announcement reported more than 26 million products from approximately 9,000 merchants.
What is Skroutz Last Mile?
Skroutz Last Mile is the group’s proprietary delivery operation, created after Skroutz acquired SendX in 2021. It handles a significant share of marketplace deliveries and supports the Skroutz Point network.
What is Fulfilled by Skroutz?
Fulfilled by Skroutz is a warehousing and order-fulfilment service through which Skroutz can store merchants’ products and manage packaging, delivery and returns.
Is Skroutz a fintech company?
Skroutz is primarily an e-commerce marketplace, but its group includes EveryPay, which obtained an Electronic Money Institution licence in 2024. This allows the group to provide financial products including digital wallet services.
How many Skroutz Plus subscribers are there?
In June 2026, Skroutz reported approximately 260,000 Skroutz Plus members, following 21% annual membership growth.
Did Blackstone buy Skroutz?
Blackstone signed a definitive agreement in May 2026 to acquire a majority stake in Skroutz from CVC and part of the founders’ holdings. Greece’s Competition Commission approved the acquisition of sole control on July 30, 2026.
Is George Chatzigeorgiou leaving Skroutz after the Blackstone deal?
No. The announced transaction states that the founders will retain a stake and continue leading the company, while George Chatzigeorgiou will remain CEO.
In which countries is Skroutz expanding?
Beyond Greece, Skroutz has established a presence in Cyprus and has expanded more recently into Romania and Bulgaria, with Southeast Europe forming an important part of its growth strategy.