Almedia, the Berlin-founded advertising technology company behind rewards platform Freecash, this week opened a new London office at MYO King's Cross St. Pancras, entering one of the most contested hiring markets in European tech at a moment when AI companies are pouring resources into the same postcode.

A Berlin company arrives at a crowded table

The London office, confirmed by Almedia on June 26, 2026, will function as a hub dedicated to expanding the company's data capabilities across three disciplines: data science, data engineering, and machine learning. The move marks a deliberate international step for a firm that operates across seven countries with a team of more than 160 people and whose consumer platform, Freecash, has accumulated over 80 million registered users worldwide.

What makes the timing unusual is the specific location Almedia has chosen. King's Cross St. Pancras has become a cluster for technology companies with significant AI ambitions. Both OpenAI and Anthropic, according to Almedia, have recently signed major offices in the same area - making the neighborhood an emerging focal point for talent capable of working at the intersection of data infrastructure and machine learning. Almedia is now drawing from the same hiring pool. The difference, the company notes, is that it is doing so without any external funding and on a profitable basis.

The Financial Times ranked Almedia as Europe's third fastest-growing company overall and the fastest-growing advertising company on the continent in its FT1000 list. That recognition came from a business that grew without venture capital or private equity, a path that remains rare in European ad tech and rarer still among companies operating at Almedia's current scale.

What Freecash does, and why data sits at its core

To understand why Almedia is hiring data engineers in London rather than, say, marketing directors or sales staff, it helps to understand how the business actually generates returns for advertisers.

Freecash is a rewarded user acquisition platform. Mobile game publishers and other advertisers pay Almedia when users complete meaningful in-app actions - reaching a specific level in a game, making an in-app purchase, or signing up for a service - rather than simply for the install event itself. Almedia then shares a portion of that advertising revenue with the Freecash users who completed those tasks. The platform has paid out over $300 million in total rewards to date, according to Almedia.

The commercial logic of this arrangement depends entirely on accurate matching. An advertiser wanting players who will progress past level 20 of a mobile game needs Freecash to identify, from its user base, the people most likely to do exactly that. A wrong match wastes the advertiser's money and delivers the user a frustrating experience. The quality of that matching work - which users see which offers, in what order, at what moment - is a data problem at its foundation. So is the measurement layer: proving to advertisers that the users Freecash delivered actually generated the downstream behavior they paid for.

On the other side of the equation sits Link, Almedia's publisher-facing product, which turns that user engagement into incremental revenue and improved lifetime value for app and game developers. Both sides of the business - matching users to the right opportunities, and measuring the returns those matches generate - require continuous data processing at scale.

According to Tristan Mackrory, Almedia's VP of People: "London is one of the best places in the world to build a data-driven business, and opening an office here is a natural step as we continue to scale globally. Data sits at the centre of everything we do, from how we match users to how we prove returns for our partners. Growing our presence in London gives us access to some of the strongest talent in the industry as we build the next evolution of the advertising sector."

London reclaimed its position as Europe's top tech market in 2026

The choice of London carries strategic weight beyond Almedia's internal needs. According to Almedia, London reclaimed its position as Europe's leading tech ecosystem in 2026, having overtaken Paris. The concentration of data and machine learning talent in the city - built partly through decades of financial services investment in quantitative roles, and partly through the expansion of large US tech companies establishing European engineering outposts - makes it a logically attractive location for a company whose core technical challenge involves real-time data matching and attribution.

That broader ecosystem matters for a company like Almedia, which competes in the rewarded UA segment of mobile advertising. The AppsFlyer 2025 Performance Index found that over one-third of leading user acquisition sources in mobile advertising are now rewarded platforms - a significant structural shift in how mobile game publishers and app developers acquire users. The data infrastructure required to compete in that segment has grown more complex as the channel has scaled.

Freecash itself has had a turbulent 2026. The iOS app was removed from the Apple App Store on April 13, 2026, without advance notice, following media coverage that Almedia disputed. The removal subsequently extended to Google Play, creating a two-month period in which the platform was unavailable on both major mobile distribution channels. The Google Play reinstatement came on May 7, 2026, and Freecash returned to the Apple App Store on June 17, 2026, completing the platform's restoration to both channels. The scale of the disruption - affecting a platform that had reached number 2 in the US App Store overall chart and had added 19 million new users in 2026 before the removal - underscored how dependent the business is on data systems capable of rebuilding momentum quickly once distribution is restored.

The London office opens nine days after that iOS reinstatement, a proximity that is probably not coincidental. With both app store channels now operational, scaling the data team that underpins matching and measurement becomes a more immediate operational priority than it would have been during the disruption period.

The talent competition at King's Cross

Almedia's decision to locate at King's Cross St. Pancras puts it in the middle of a talent market that has been heating up. The presence of OpenAI and Anthropic in the same cluster signals where the industry's largest AI companies believe London's strongest technical hiring concentrations are. Data scientists and machine learning engineers experienced with large-scale recommendation systems, real-time bidding environments, and user behavior modelling are the exact profiles that both AI labs and advertising technology companies require - making the competitive dynamics at this particular location more intense than in most other parts of the city.

Almedia operates from offices in Berlin, London, New York, Seoul, Beijing, Tokyo, and Yerevan, according to the company. The London office is described as joining that global footprint rather than replacing or consolidating any existing location. The specific roles the company is hiring for in London - data science, data engineering, and machine learning - suggest a deliberate building of technical depth rather than a commercial sales or client services expansion.

That pattern reflects the structure of the rewarded UA market itself. Platforms operating in this space compete not on brand or creative but on signal quality: how accurately they can predict which user will complete which task, how quickly they can detect when a campaign is underperforming, and how convincingly they can prove the value of that performance to advertisers. All three capabilities are fundamentally dependent on the quality of the data team.

A bootstrapped company in an AI-funded neighborhood

The detail that Almedia has reached this scale without external funding deserves some attention, particularly in the context of its new neighborhood. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have raised capital in the tens of billions of dollars. Almedia, by contrast, has built a team of over 160 people, achieved an FT1000 ranking as Europe's third fastest-growing company, reached over 80 million users, and paid out $300 million in user rewards - all without external investment.

That operational path has implications for how the company approaches hiring and expansion. Without investor pressure to grow headcount ahead of revenue, the London office's data team hiring is likely to be targeted rather than broad - focused on specific technical gaps that constrain the platform's matching and measurement performance. The company has not disclosed how many roles it is opening in London or what the intended team size is at the location.

The FT1000 ranking, which covers the fastest-growing companies in Europe by revenue, provides an external reference point for the company's trajectory. Being ranked third overall - not just in advertising, but across all European companies included in the index - reflects a compound annual growth rate that only a handful of businesses on the continent can match. That velocity was generated by the rewarded UA model: connecting mobile apps and games with users who were incentivised to engage, rather than simply downloading and ignoring.

The previous PPC Land coverage of the Freecash iOS removal noted that Almedia's advertising budget - not its revenue - exceeded $300 million annually at the time of the April disruption, a figure that covered spending across Google, Meta, DSPs, television, and influencer partnerships. A company spending at that level while remaining bootstrapped and profitable occupies an unusual position in the advertising technology landscape. Most companies at this stage of spending have taken external capital. The London expansion suggests Almedia intends to maintain that independent trajectory.

What this means for the marketing industry

The London office matters to the advertising and marketing community for reasons that extend beyond Almedia's own operations. The rewarded UA channel has grown from a niche acquisition method into a significant part of the mobile marketing stack, and the companies competing within it are increasingly defined by their data capabilities rather than their commercial relationships.

PPC Land's coverage of the Freecash iOS reinstatement noted that the two-month app store disruption had illustrated the operational and financial risks of platform dependency in mobile advertising at scale. For mobile game publishers that had suspended or reduced Freecash campaign activity during that period, the restoration of both channels reopened a performance-based acquisition mechanism that pays only for post-install user behavior rather than install volume. The data infrastructure behind that mechanism - which is what Almedia is now building out in London - determines whether those publishers can trust the platform's matching and attribution at the scale they need.

The location also illustrates a broader dynamic in the European technology market. The concentration of AI capability and data talent in a specific postcode in north London reflects a clustering effect that creates competitive advantages for companies positioned inside it and meaningful disadvantages for those that are not. Almedia, by opening at MYO King's Cross St. Pancras rather than a lower-cost location elsewhere in the city or in a different European city, is making a deliberate bet that proximity to the strongest talent concentration in European tech is worth the premium.

PPC Land has tracked the AppsFlyer performance rankings that document Freecash's position within the competitive landscape of mobile user acquisition. The rewarded platforms category as a whole has been gaining share, with Freecash, Gamelight, Mistplay, and exmox all improving in the most recent index. Maintaining that competitive position as the category scales requires exactly the kind of data team that the London office is intended to build.

Almedia will host its first Almedia Summit on July 2 and 3, 2026, in Berlin - a gathering of mobile game publishers, advertising platforms, and user acquisition teams. The event, scheduled approximately two weeks after the iOS reinstatement and the same week as the London office opening, positions the company as returning to active market-facing engagement after a disruptive period. The data team expansion in London provides the operational foundation for whatever product and commercial commitments come out of that summit.

Timeline

  • December 3, 2025 - AppsFlyer 2025 Performance Index published; rewarded platforms including Freecash improve their rankings across the mobile advertising landscape. PPC Land coverage
  • April 13, 2026 - Apple removes Freecash iOS app from the App Store without advance notice, following media coverage Almedia disputes. PPC Land coverage
  • April 13-14, 2026 - Google Play removal follows; Almedia discloses a $300 million-plus annual advertising budget and files appeals with both platforms. PPC Land coverage
  • May 7, 2026 - Freecash reinstated on Google Play, restoring Android distribution while iOS channel remains unavailable. PPC Land coverage
  • June 17, 2026 - Freecash returns to the Apple App Store, completing the platform's restoration to both major mobile distribution channels after a two-month iOS absence. PPC Land coverage
  • June 26, 2026 - Almedia officially opens London office at MYO King's Cross St. Pancras, with the stated purpose of building a data team spanning data science, data engineering, and machine learning.

Summary

Who: Almedia GmbH, a Berlin-founded advertising technology company with over 160 employees across seven countries, operating Freecash (80 million-plus users) and Link, its publisher-side product. The company is ranked Europe's third fastest-growing company by the Financial Times FT1000.

What: Almedia opened a new London office at MYO King's Cross St. Pancras, dedicated to building a data team covering data science, data engineering, and machine learning. The company is hiring from the same talent pool as OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have offices in the same cluster.

When: The office officially opened on June 26, 2026.

Where: MYO King's Cross St. Pancras, London - a location identified by Almedia as part of a technology cluster that includes major OpenAI and Anthropic offices. Almedia's existing offices are in Berlin, New York, Seoul, Beijing, Tokyo, and Yerevan.

Why: London reclaimed its position as Europe's leading tech ecosystem in 2026, according to Almedia. The company's core business - matching users to appropriate offers on Freecash and measuring the returns delivered to advertisers - depends on data science and machine learning capabilities. Growing the data team in London gives Almedia access to a concentration of specialist talent that supports its international expansion and competitive position in the rewarded user acquisition market.