REM People is the kind of business that does not need an introduction inside a category, and is almost unknown outside it. Founded in 2015, they run retail-execution and shopper-intelligence programmes for more than seventy global brands across more than forty countries. The shelves you walk past in Riyadh and Mexico City have, more often than not, been audited by their teams.
Until late 2025, the company’s centre of gravity sat between Istanbul, Dubai, London, Jeddah, and Cairo. Europe was a customer market, not a base. That changed in December, when REM People formally opened its European headquarters in Malta with support from Malta Enterprise.
We have been alongside the company since early 2024, first as advisors on the Europe question and then as the operating partner on the ground in Malta. This is a short account of the brief, the choice, and the first ninety days.
The brief
REM People’s leadership came with a simple question and a deadline. The simple question: where in Europe should the business set up so that a USD 22 million revenue target by the end of 2026 stays credible? The deadline: a board update at the end of Q1 2025 with a recommendation and a counter-recommendation.
We treat that kind of brief as a structured comparison rather than a hunch. Three jurisdictions made the shortlist on the first pass: Ireland for the language-and-tax familiarity, Cyprus for the Middle East proximity, and Malta for what turned out to be the right combination of regulatory speed and serious commercial substance.
Why Malta won
Two factors decided it.
First, Malta Enterprise, the country’s investment promotion agency under the Ministry for the Economy, Enterprise and Strategic Projects, turned out to be a genuine partner rather than a brochure. From the first meeting they understood that REM People is not a single-product software shop. They are a hybrid operator with field teams, technology, and a services layer that resists the usual fintech-style incentives. The Malta Enterprise team built a package that matched the actual business.
Second, Malta’s existing concentration of retail and consumer-goods companies gave REM People a customer adjacency they could use from day one. The base was never going to be sales-only; it had to host product, analytics, and recruitment for Europe. Malta could do all three at a sensible cost.
The first ninety days
The opening of a foreign office tends to look impressive on paper and then quietly stall for a quarter. We try to design out that quarter. By the time the Malta entity was incorporated, we had already lined up:
- An office address with room to triple headcount, not just seat the founding team.
- A local director, payroll provider, and corporate bank, all introduced and tested.
- Three priority customer conversations in Italy, Spain, and Germany, pre-warmed before launch week.
- A shortlist of regional hires (analytics, business development and a country lead) ready to start interviewing.
The first ninety days were spent converting that list into signatures and seats. Not glamorous. Necessary.
The metric: USD 22 million
Targets that depend on a new geography are easy to set and hard to defend. The 22 million figure for 2026 is built on three components: existing customer expansion through Malta as the contracting entity, two named-account wins from the European pipeline, and a margin uplift from running European delivery locally rather than from Istanbul.
None of those depend on a heroic outcome. They depend on execution at the speed Malta now allows.
Europe was never the problem. Having a European address that customers could buy from was.
What comes next
The Malta office is the platform; the work now moves to filling it. Over the next two quarters we are focused on hiring, customer onboarding under the new contracting entity, and a small set of partnerships that turn the European base into a regional standard for REM People’s category.
If you are weighing where in Europe to land your next office, and you would rather the answer were not Ireland by default, we are happy to walk through how we ran the comparison. Get in touch.