EVO Built Ukraine’s Online Mall - Then Became the Plumbing

A shopper opens Prom.ua looking for a power bank. A small merchant in Dnipro uploads a catalogue. A buyer on Shafa sells a coat, a homeowner posts a repair job on Kabanchik, and a seller accepts a card through RozetkaPay. The interfaces look unrelated. Underneath, they describe one company’s long argument about the internet: local commerce works better when the expensive, boring parts are shared.

That company is EVO, a Ukrainian product technology group headquartered in Kyiv. Its public face is a portfolio rather than a single app. Prom is the broad marketplace; Bigl offers another general shopping destination; Shafa handles consumer resale; Satu serves Kazakhstan; Kabanchik matches customers with people who can complete household and business tasks. RozetkaPay moves money through online and offline checkouts. Volonter and Pidmoha apply platform mechanics to wartime fundraising and reconstruction.

The list can sound like a cabinet of websites. The more revealing view is a commercial loop. EVO attracts sellers, structures their inventory, gathers buyer demand, makes the transaction safer, and increasingly handles the payment. Logistics closes the circle. Each product gives the group another angle on the same stubborn problems: how to be found, how to be trusted, how to get paid, and how to deliver what was promised.

The original hack was affordability

Prom.ua began in 2008 with three friends who had known one another since school: Mykola Paliienko, Denys Horovyi and Taras Murashko. They split the early responsibilities along unusually legible lines. Paliienko worked as the architect and chief executive, Murashko led technology, and Horovyi handled product and marketing. Their first offer was practical rather than glamorous - help a small business establish an online presence without commissioning a bespoke site that could cost thousands of dollars.

Prom started as a site constructor for entrepreneurs. Then the collection of individual merchant pages generated something more valuable than web-design convenience: aggregated supply. A person searching for a drill or dress did not care which microsite held it. Search, catalogue structure, reviews, seller ratings and a common basket made the whole network more useful. The tool for getting online became a destination for buying online.

That sequence still matters. EVO did not begin by asking shoppers to visit an empty digital mall. It solved a merchant’s expensive job first, assembled inventory, and let demand form around the resulting catalogue. Today the company says roughly 60,000 small and midsize merchants list more than 100 million products on Prom. About 12 million potential buyers visit in a month, with 6 million buying regularly. The figures come from EVO’s current company materials, so they should be read as platform-reported scale, but they make the flywheel visible.

A portfolio organized by chores

EVO’s products make more sense when grouped by the job a customer arrives to do. Prom and Bigl are for finding new goods across many categories. Shafa is for circulating things people already own, attracting more than 5 million monthly visitors by EVO’s count. Satu gives 10,000 sellers in Kazakhstan a route to national demand through a catalogue of about 11 million products. Kabanchik replaces a shelf with a task: describe the job, find a specialist, agree on the work. About 50,000 tasks are created there in a typical month.

The portfolio avoids forcing every behavior into one interface. Hiring a plumber, reselling a jacket and ordering a commercial refrigerator require different trust signals. They can still share capabilities behind the screen: customer support, identity checks, merchant onboarding, analytics, search expertise, payment processing and delivery integrations. This is EVO’s main difference from a simple classified site or a standalone software vendor. It operates the market and sells the tools that make the market function.

Its customers consequently sit on both sides of the transaction. A merchant pays for access, promotion and commerce services; a consumer supplies attention and repeat demand. Service professionals turn their availability into searchable supply. Payment products can serve businesses beyond EVO’s own marketplaces. Revenue can come from seller subscriptions, commissions, promoted placement, payment processing and related financial services. EVO does not publish enough segment detail to calculate the mix, but the portfolio makes the incentives plain: more successful transactions create more places to charge for useful work.

The checkout becomes a product

RozetkaPay is the clearest sign of where EVO wants to sit in the market. The service began operating as the group’s fintech direction in 2019, after EVO and Rozetka combined. Its pitch is broader than placing a card form on a page. It processes online and offline payments, integrates bank and card-network services, checks prospective customers through anti-fraud, KYC and AML tools, supports wallets and subscriptions, and is developing payment accounts and credit products.

EVO says RozetkaPay now serves more than 12,000 Ukrainian merchants and carries about 100 transactions a minute. Its distribution advantage comes from being built beside marketplaces with millions of shoppers. A seller already using the ecosystem can adopt a payment product where the orders happen, while the payment team can design around the awkward edges of marketplace commerce: splitting flows, confirming identities, protecting buyers and settling many independent merchants.

Regulation deepens that position. RozetkaPay received accreditation under Ukraine’s updated payment-services rules in 2023. In 2025, the National Bank expanded its authorization so the company could open and operate accounts for individuals and businesses. The change creates room for balances, faster settlement, loyalty and eventually credit to live closer to the sale. In June 2026, the legal entity called Financial Company EVO adopted the RozetkaPay name. Customer services and terms continued, but the paperwork caught up with the consumer brand.

A merger without one giant storefront

The 2018 combination with Rozetka gave EVO another unusual feature: one of its biggest market alternatives is also its group partner. At the time of closing, the companies said their combined platforms produced two billion visits and 30 million e-commerce transactions a year across four countries. Rozetka bought the stake previously held by Naspers, while EVO’s founders rolled their interests into the combined company. The price was not disclosed.

Prom and Rozetka did not collapse into one brand. Their teams and market positions remained distinct, while the rationale sat in scale - shared infrastructure, logistics, technology investment and services around the consumer. That structure reduces the tidiness of a simple competitor chart. Rozetka, OLX, Epicentr and Kasta may compete for Ukrainian shopping attention; LiqPay, WayForPay, Fondy and NovaPay offer alternatives in payments. EVO’s bet is that specialized marketplaces connected by infrastructure can hold a durable place between a general retailer and a neutral software supplier.

Building while the lights may go out

EVO’s culture statements are unusually concrete because the operating environment is. The company describes its Kyiv office as having autonomous power, uninterrupted connectivity, heat and an equipped bomb shelter. Its six published values - adaptability, self-development, teamwork, customer centricity, integrity and entrepreneurial spirit - read differently beside those details. Reliability is no longer an abstract uptime percentage when employees and merchants are working through attacks and blackouts.

The portfolio adapted too. Volonter gives charities and volunteers tools to run fundraisers, raffles and reporting; the company says roughly UAH 1 million is raised there each month. Pidmoha matches volunteers who can clear rubble with patrons supporting reconstruction. Employee charity evenings and auctions have raised UAH 22 million and sent more than 220 reconnaissance drones to the front, according to EVO. Another employee project manufactures entrenching shovels and reported sending 25,000 of them.

These projects are not proof that every marketplace should become a civic platform. They show what reusable software and an activated network can do when ordinary commercial jobs are interrupted by extraordinary needs. Forms, identity, payments, matching, reputation and reporting are generic platform components. The purpose attached to them can change quickly.

Where EVO fits now

EVO occupies the regional commerce-infrastructure layer. It is more operational than a SaaS vendor because it owns destinations where buyers arrive. It is less centralized than a single retailer because independent merchants and service providers supply much of the catalogue. And it reaches further into the transaction than a listings site because payments, fraud controls, identity and logistics are becoming first-class products.

That mix creates an advantage and a risk. The advantage is learning density: millions of searches, orders and payments reveal where commerce breaks. EVO can turn a recurring failure into a shared product and distribute it through channels it already owns. The risk is organizational drag. A portfolio spanning two countries, several marketplace types, regulated finance and wartime platforms can scatter attention. The 2022 separation of the Vchasno electronic-document service and Zakupki procurement platform into Tabula Rasa suggests that even a portfolio company occasionally needs sharper boundaries.

For merchants, EVO’s practical promise remains close to the 2008 version: reach customers without building every layer yourself. For shoppers, the value is selection with enough structure and protection to make a fragmented seller base usable. For EVO, the next contest is less about launching another catalogue than making the existing transaction loop feel invisible. If discovery, trust, payment and delivery work, the plumbing disappears. The merchant sees an order. The buyer sees a parcel. EVO earns its place in between.