Apify started in 2015, sharing one room in Prague. Eleven years on, it's more than 250 people from 36 countries, building the world's largest marketplace of ready-to-run tools for AI. New Apifiers arrive every month, and the Careers page never stays quiet. A company growing like that does not get to move house slowly.
Apifiers choose where they work, and most of us choose the office. That's no accident. Making it somewhere people want to be is the Office and Event team's job: lunches, coffee, rooms that are free when you book them, the good vibes, the meetups and events every week, and the hundred small things nobody notices until they stop. Martina has run that team since April 2025, as Workplace Experience Manager.
She'd been in the job for about a month when she found out a big surprise. The company was moving out of Palác Lucerna, the landmark it had called home for years, and into 100yards, a renovated historical building that the landlord would hand over as an empty shell. It wasn't on the agenda she was hired for, but she hopped on it fast anyway.
In between came a year of Tuesday site meetings, deliveries booked from early morning to late at night, 14 missing doors, and a deadline that couldn't budge. Martina moved her desk into the unfinished building months before anyone else and stayed through a final week when there were still no kitchens, no meeting rooms, and no guarantee the date would stick.
Before Apify, she spent eight years in hospitality and five as an Office Manager at Rohlik Group, which is another way of saying she's spent her whole career making other people's days work. In this Life at Apify story, we look at what it takes to move a fast-growing company out of a building it loved and into one it had to build first.
Watch the epic 100yards trailer.
Apify has moved house more than once since 2015. The full story of those years, offices included, is worth your time if you want the whole arc.
Leaving home
Apify's previous home was the top floors of Palác Lucerna, the Art Nouveau palace that Vacslav Havel - grandfather of Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and president - built between 1907 and 1921, with David Cerny's upside-down horse hanging in the passage below. Apifiers worked in Havel's old atelier and apartment. The tall windows we loved were there because a painter needs even light, which turns out to suit screens just as well. From the balcony you could see both Prague Castle and Wenceslas Square.
It was also where the company grew the most, and wore it well. The lobby hosted meetups, panels, and conferences every week. It was the place where Apifiers from every team could hang out and collaborate.
We really love it [Lucerna] because it's in the very center of the city, which makes it very close for everyone living in Prague. And we love people to come to the office.
-- Jan Curn, Apify's Founder and CEO
The building was also wearing down and was changing hands again, with more reconstruction on the way. Apifiers were attached to the place, and there was real pride in working somewhere with that much history. We just ran out of room before we ran out of reasons to stay.
What I'll miss most about Lucerna isn't the office itself, but everything that happened there. It was imperfect, sometimes chaotic, and full of little things that drove us crazy, but it was completely ours. We grew, changed, and celebrated so many important moments. I definitely won't miss the elevators or the AC, but I will miss the memories.
-- Martina Bovanova, Apify's Workplace Experience Manager
The replacement was 100yards, a historic building where Apify would be the largest tenant. But it was empty. Everything an office needs would have to be specified, bid on, negotiated, and installed first.
A year of Tuesdays
The work started long before anything visible happened. A workplace analysis, one-on-one calls with a representative from each team, a company-wide questionnaire, and a space plan developed with an architectural studio. Nine months went by before a single wall went up. Once construction started, every Tuesday became construction day: a site meeting with vendors, contractors, and project managers, walking the floors, and rebuilding the plan around whatever had gone wrong or right that week.
She knew what she wanted from the start. What changed was how technical her questions got. A few months in, she had very serious opinions about millimeters, door directions, acoustics, sockets, ceiling details, and floor layers. The plans on paper and the building in real life were sometimes two different worlds. Almost nothing was perfectly straight, level, or exactly where you expected it to be, so the plan adapted week by week.
"Martina, we have a problem with the acoustic supplier. They ran out of X326 color. Can we change it to this one for the same price?" Yes.
"We'd like to propose more space behind the desks. Is that OK?" No.
"Are you sure about the matcha kitchen?" Yes.
"The glass is different, but we like it. Can it stay?" No.
Yes. No. Yes. No. That was my Tuesdays. All eyes on you, everyone expecting to win their fights and get more budget. And me on the other side of that.
-- Martina Bovanova, Apify's Workplace Experience Manager
In February 2026, before the walls went up, she ran guided tours through a completely empty floor plan, answering questions about rooms that didn't exist yet. On a build this size, the question was never whether something would go wrong, only how late it would pop up.
We had hundreds of unexpected situations along the way, but that's simply part of a project like this. One of my favorites was the 14 doors. When all the doors were to be installed, we discovered the supplier had forgotten the last 14. Fine. They eventually brought them. But they forgot the doorframes. For all 14. How do you remember 14 doors and forget 14 doorframes? I still don't know.
-- Martina Bovanova, Apify's Workplace Experience Manager
On July 14, 2026, Apify took the space over from the construction company. Twenty-seven days to move-in.
The last three weeks
Keeping it moving.
The schedule had no slack in it. Personal items were collected by the end of July, and anything not packed wasn't coming. The old office shut for a deep clean, and the first week of August was the main move.
Then came the physical work. Desks, meeting tables, and monitors taken apart, driven across the square, rebuilt, and put in the right place. Two weeks out, the kitchens, the community zones, and the meeting room AV were still unbuilt. Deliveries were booked from 6 AM to 9 PM, and Martina's team and the IT crew worked through it, weekends included.
Call it a miracle, but it was definitely a planned miracle. I have to admit, I was probably not everyone's favorite person those last weeks. I pushed hard, had some heated conversations, and made difficult and sometimes very unpleasant last-minute decisions. What kept me going was how no one around us believed we'd make it on time. I love proving people wrong.
-- Martina Bovanova, Apify's Workplace Experience Manager
Before and after in the new communal space at 100yards.
Welcome home
What people walked into on August 10 was the work of many hands. Architects and a technical project manager. The contractors who spent months turning a concrete shell into rooms. The movers who emptied Lucerna. Petra and Lenka, Chief of Staff and Chief Legal Counsel, who ran the landlord negotiations. Then Martina's own office team, Kaja, Tyna, Kerol, and Mariia, working alongside Dominik and Tony from IT to wire the phone booths and build out the meeting rooms, and much, much more.
A lot of it was physical. A lot of it was internal communication. Apifiers are quite passionate, and everyone wanted to know everything.
My team worked insanely hard. Ridiculous hours, weekends, supporting each other when things got tough. We made it because everyone genuinely cared about crossing the finish line. Calls with Kaja at midnight and then again at 6 AM are unforgettable.
-- Martina Bovanova, Apify's Workplace Experience Manager
The new offices occupy the third and fourth floors of a classicist building on Na Příkopě, the line of the old moat that once separated Prague's Old Town from the New Town, about as central as the city gets. Two kitchens. Two terraces. A community space that'll hold an all-hands for hundreds and the (in)famous Apify parties equally well. A video studio kitted out for filming, podcasts, and webinars. Seventeen meeting rooms, each with a booking tablet outside the door. Phone booths, a game zone, a bike room, lockers, and a dog room with its own sofas and water bowls. Hundreds of chairs, 160 of them new Herman Millers and many carried over from Lucerna because they were too good to leave behind.
The meeting rooms are named after actors. The biggest is Meryl Streep, which seats 25, and there's a Chuck Norris that isn't a meeting room at all but a relax space where the dogs are allowed. The studio's the one room named after a director, so of course it's Steven Spielberg. And on the third floor there's a Vaclav Havel, named for the playwright, whose grandfather built the palace we'd just moved out of.
Taking over a finished office turned out to be the easy part.
August 10 was the finish line, but running the office started the same day, the moment 200 people arrived and started properly testing everything. Toilets not working, we want more plants, where's my favorite cup, AC sounds funny. An office is never really "done."
The feedback I didn't expect? "Add more memes."
-- Martina Bovanova, Apify's Workplace Experience Manager
Making new memories
The grand opening party was on September 11, 2026, with the vibes between Cannes and Karlovy Vary. Seven months before it, the same rooms were bare concrete.
Check out the Apify offices at 100yards and scenes from the red carpet opening party.
For Martina, the move was never really about the address. It was the chance to build something from scratch and shape it around who Apify is and where it's going, and she is quick to credit Jan, Apify's CEO, and Simona, Apify's VP of People, for the trust and the freedom to do it at that scale. Seeing something that existed only in her head turn into a place where Apifiers spend their days is, she says, hard to describe.
And I hope 100yards is never completely "finished." I want it to keep evolving with us, change with our needs, and become a place where many more memories, ideas and, inevitably, a little bit of chaos are created.
-- Martina Bovanova, Apify's Workplace Experience Manager
