Maja adopted a dog who was wrong for every part of her life.
Mika was an eighteen-month-old Border Collie mix weighing just under 20 kilos. He looked calm in the photos. His profile said ‘friendly, quick to learn, looking for an active family.’ Maja had an office job, a small third-floor flat and four free hours at the weekend. She only read the first part.
Six weeks later, her sofa was no longer a sofa, she slept four hours a night and Mika had begun chewing his paws. It was not his fault. It was not Maja’s fault. It was a match nobody had examined closely enough.
“Nobody had done anything wrong. We still had to return the dog. That was when we knew something was missing in between.
We started listening to the people who do this work every day.
Maja and Tobi — her friend who had worked as a veterinary assistant for eight years — visited shelters and kept asking the same question: what is going wrong here that nobody sees?
The answers were almost identical everywhere. Online portals from 2014. Profiles that reduced a dog to a table of size, age and suitability for children. Adopters with nobody to call on the first difficult night. And a statistic everyone quietly knew: around one in five adopted dogs returns within the first year.
Three shelter managers told us the same thing that evening: ‘We need a tool that slows this process down, not one that speeds it up.’ That was when we knew what to build.
An app that asks questions first — and shows dogs second.
We sat down with three behavioural biologists and four shelter teams and designed a test with 14 questions. When did you last get up at six in the morning? How much can you genuinely give on a June day when everyone else is away?
Petch began its first trial with three shelters in Berlin and Brandenburg. Today, we work with more than forty shelters and rescue organisations in nine countries. Mika now lives in Mecklenburg with a retired forester and acres of woodland — who found him on the second attempt, through Petch.
Three years, one clear direction.
Petch did not appear overnight. This is how we got here — from the first shelter visits to today.
Mika goes back
The difficult realisation that set everything in motion.
Six shelters and a notebook
Maja and Tobi visit shelters in Berlin, Brandenburg and Hamburg. They listen more than they type.
The Buddy Test takes shape
Fourteen questions, developed with three behavioural biologists, discarded four times and finally made right.
First prototype
Shelters in Berlin and Hamburg and PfotenRettung Munich test Petch with their adopters.
Public launch
Petch arrives in the App Store with twelve shelter partners and one quiet press release.
More than 12,000 adoptions
Forty shelters, nine countries. We keep going — slowly, carefully and without rushing.
Four principles behind every decision we make.
We did not invent these in a workshop. They are the ideas we return to whenever something goes wrong.
Speed is not a value.
We slow adoption down at the right moments — during selection, the first meeting and the first week. A good match takes longer than a quick one.
Animal welfare comes first.
We measure success in lasting adoptions, not downloads. If a dog is not the right fit, we say so — even when the person is enthusiastic.
With shelters, not for them.
Every feature is developed with the people who arrange adoptions every day. If something does not make sense, we remove it — even if it took us weeks.
We do not disappear after the signature.
The first thirty days are the hardest. That is exactly where we offer the most support — with webinars, chat and professionals who really answer the phone.
Eleven people, one office dog, plenty of coffee.
Petch is small and we want to keep it that way for a while. Meet the three people who started it all.
A small Kreuzberg office. An old bakery with too many plants.
We work on Bergmannstraße in a room that once baked bread. Three dogs rotate between the sofas. Every Friday, each team member visits at least one shelter.