I Built Tinies from a Village in Cyprus. Here's Why That's Not a Disadvantage.
Parekklisia is a small village in the Limassol district of Cyprus. It sits about ten minutes from a British military base, thirty minutes from the Troodos mountains, and approximately 5,400 miles from Silicon Valley. It is where I live, where I work, and where I built Tinies.
I say this not because the geography is interesting — though it is — but because it is the first thing that sounds like a liability and isn't.
What Cyprus taught me about pet care infrastructure
Cyprus has a stray animal crisis that most Western Europeans and Americans never think about. There are an estimated 1.5 million stray cats on the island — roughly two for every human resident. Tens of thousands of cats and dogs live without owners, without consistent veterinary care, and without the kind of organised sanctuary infrastructure that wealthier countries take for granted. The ones that do have sanctuaries depend almost entirely on volunteers, donations, and founders who are running operations on goodwill and personal savings.
I run one of those sanctuaries. Gardens of St. Gertrude currently cares for 92 cats in Parekklisia. The real cost of running a sanctuary in Cyprus is something I can tell you down to the euro — because I pay it every month.
I am not telling you this to establish credibility. I am telling you this because it is the reason Tinies exists.
When you live inside a broken system, you understand it differently than someone studying it from the outside. You know which parts are broken because of funding, which parts are broken because of infrastructure, and which parts are broken because nobody has ever built the tool that would fix them. Pet care marketplaces have existed for years — Rover in the US and UK, PetBacker across Asia and parts of Europe. None of them were built by someone who actually needed them to work for the animals, not just for the transaction.
Fifteen years of building standards for broken industries
Before Tinies, I spent fifteen years doing something that turns out to be directly relevant: building certification and standards infrastructure for industries that did not have it.
The Paleo Foundation created the first third-party certification standards for the paleo, keto, and grain-free food categories — product categories that had no regulatory definition, no testing protocol, and no way for consumers to verify that what they were buying was what the label claimed. We built the standards, the testing methodology, the certification process, and the audit systems. Today those certifications appear on products in major retailers across the United States.
MicrobiomeMedicine.com did something similar for the microbiome space — bringing standards-based thinking to an emerging field where the gap between marketing claims and clinical evidence was growing faster than anyone could track.
The pattern is the same every time. You find an industry where trust is low, standards are missing, and the existing players benefit from the ambiguity. You build a system that creates accountability. You make it transparent enough that consumers can verify what they are being told. And you design the economics so that doing the right thing is also the sustainable thing.
Pet care in Cyprus — and frankly in most of the world — has exactly this problem. There are no standards for who can call themselves a pet sitter. No verification system. No accountability infrastructure. No transparency about where money goes. The platforms that dominate the market take 25% or more from providers and give nothing back to the ecosystem they depend on.
That is the gap I know how to close. The tools are different from food certification. The approach is not.
The 90% model is not charity — it is architecture
Tinies routes 90% of platform commission to animal rescue organisations. This is the part that makes traditional marketplace investors uncomfortable, so let me explain why it is actually the most strategically sound decision in the entire business.
Pet care marketplaces have a loyalty problem. Rover and PetBacker spend enormous amounts on customer acquisition, and then watch as owners and sitters take their relationship off-platform after the first booking. Wag lost $69.5 million and filed for bankruptcy in part because they never solved this. When your platform takes 20–40% and gives nothing back, both sides of the marketplace have every incentive to cut you out.
The 90% model changes the incentive structure. When an owner knows that their booking funds rescue organisations, they have a reason to stay on-platform beyond convenience. When a provider knows that their work generates donations — and they can see the impact on their profile — they have a reason to keep booking through Tinies rather than taking clients direct. When a rescue organisation receives consistent funding through the platform, they become advocates for the platform within their community.
This is not altruism. This is a flywheel. The giving creates loyalty. The loyalty creates retention. The retention creates sustainable revenue. The revenue funds more giving. It compounds.
Every platform in this space has tried to solve retention with penalties and restrictions — locking providers into exclusivity agreements, charging higher fees to new providers, making it difficult to contact clients outside the app. Tinies solves it by making the platform worth staying on. The 90% model is how.
The American angle
I am American. I built this in Cyprus. And when people ask whether Tinies is a Cypriot company or an American one, the honest answer is: it is a platform built by someone who has lived inside the problem, and who intends to take what she learned directly into the US market.
The US pet services market is the largest in the world. Americans spend over $150 billion annually on their pets, and pet care services — sitting, boarding, walking, home visits — represent one of the fastest-growing segments. Rover operates there. So do Wag, Fetch, and a dozen regional competitors. None of them were built by someone running a sanctuary. None of them route the majority of their revenue to animal welfare. And the markets that Rover forgot — the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Southeast Asia — are exactly the markets where the need is greatest and the competition is thinnest.
That is the gap. It exists in Cyprus, in Greece, in Turkey, in Portugal, in the UAE, and in the United States. The geography changes. The gap does not.
Why starting here was the right decision
Building in Cyprus meant building without assumptions. There was no dominant local platform to benchmark against, no investor telling me what the product needed to look like, no growth-at-all-costs pressure shaping feature prioritisation. There was a problem, a set of tools, and a very clear sense of what the platform needed to accomplish.
It also meant building for an international user from day one. Tinies is not a US platform trying to expand internationally. It is an international platform that happens to be expanding into the US. The international adoption infrastructure — connecting rescue animals in Cyprus with adopters across Europe — was not a feature added later. It was the starting point. The multi-language support (English, Greek, Russian) was not an afterthought. It was a launch requirement.
That is what Cyprus gave me. Not a disadvantage. A vantage point.
Where this goes
Tinies is live. The booking system, the adoption platform, the giving infrastructure — all of it works. The roadmap moves through Southern Europe and the Gulf states before a full US launch — markets chosen not by venture capital logic but by where the infrastructure gap is largest and where the animal welfare need is most acute.
If you are a pet owner in Cyprus, you can find a verified sitter today. If you are a pet care provider, you can join and keep 100% of your rate from day one.
If you are a sanctuary, a rescue organisation, or a welfare nonprofit looking for a platform partner — reach out.
If you are an investor who understands that mission alignment and financial sustainability are not opposites — we should talk.
The village is small. The problem is not.
Karen Pendergrass is the founder of Tinies and Gardens of St. Gertrude, a cat sanctuary in Parekklisia, Cyprus. She is also the founder and CEO of the Paleo Foundation and Microbiome Medicine.