About us
It started because one shelter deserved better than a shared spreadsheet.
Mancsok was founded in 2021 in Budapest, Hungary. There are 18 of us now and 63 partner shelters, and the job is still the one we started with: get the right animal to the right home, and make sure it stays that way.
Who we are
We build two things. Adopters get a web and mobile app that shows every animal available across our partner shelters, filtered by what their home can genuinely offer — other pets, children, hours alone, experience, space. Shelters get the tools to run intake, medical records, foster placements, and adoptions from a phone.
We are not a shelter and we do not hold animals. We also do not take a percentage of any adoption fee, and no shelter pays to be listed. That is not modesty; it is a structural decision. If our revenue rose when an adoption happened, we would eventually start nudging matches that should not happen, and we would tell ourselves a story about why it was fine.
What we charge for is the shelter management side, and only to organisations large enough to have a budget for software. Eleven of our 63 partners pay us anything at all.
- Founded
- 2021, Budapest, Hungary
- Team
- 18 people
- Partners
- 63 shelters and foster networks
- Adoptions
- 12,418 since launch
- Platforms
- iOS, Android, and web
- Funding
- 380M HUF seed (2024), Duna Ventures
- Contact
- szia@mancsok.example
How we got here
Five years, compressed. The parts we are proud of and the parts that cost us are both in here.
- 2021
A spreadsheet in Kőbánya
Anna Kovács had been volunteering at a shelter in the tenth district for two years. Their entire adoption process lived in one shared spreadsheet that three people edited at once and nobody trusted. She and Bence Tóth rebuilt it over a winter as a small web app for that one shelter.
- 2022
Twelve shelters, one listing page
Word travelled faster than we could build. By summer twelve shelters were entering animals directly, and for the first time a person in Szeged could see a dog in Debrecen without knowing which shelter to phone. That was the moment the thing stopped being a favour and started being a product.
- 2023
The apps
Shelter staff were logging animals from phones in kennels with no signal, and adopters were browsing on the tram. We shipped iOS and Android in March, offline-first from the first release because the alternative did not work in the buildings our users actually stand in.
- 2024
Seed round, and saying no to fees
We raised 380 million forint led by Duna Ventures. The condition we set on ourselves publicly: Mancsok never takes a percentage of an adoption fee, and never charges a shelter to be listed. Revenue comes from the shelter management tools, paid by the larger organisations that can afford them.
- 2025
Foster network and follow-up
Adoption is not the finish line. We added foster placements, and a six-month follow-up flow that checks in with adopters at week one, month one, and month six. Returns dropped from 14.2% to 9.1% in the cohorts that got it.
- 2026
63 shelters, and the boring work
Most of this year went into things nobody demos: import tools for shelters still on paper, a Hungarian-language search that actually works, and making the app usable on a six-year-old Android phone, because that is what a lot of shelter staff carry.
What we hold to
Honest profiles, always
If a dog is reactive with other dogs, the profile says so at the top, not in a paragraph nobody reads. A hidden problem becomes a return in four months, and a return is worse for the animal than a slower match.
The shelter is the customer too
Every feature gets tested by someone entering an animal one-handed while holding a lead. If it does not work in a kennel corridor on bad Wi-Fi, it does not ship.
No cut of any adoption
We take nothing from adoption fees and charge nothing for a listing. The incentive to push a match that is not right has to be absent from the business model, not just from our intentions.
Measure the outcome, not the session
Time in app is not a goal. The number we watch is adoptions that are still adoptions a year later, and we have turned off features that raised the first metric and lowered the second.
The team
Six of the 18. Most of us volunteer at a shelter, which is not a requirement and is somehow always true.
Volunteered at a Kőbánya shelter for two years before writing a line of the product. Still does a Saturday shift there, which is where roughly half our roadmap comes from.
Spent six years on payments infrastructure and wanted to build something where the failure mode was not a rounding error. Writes most of the sync layer.
Onboarded 51 of our 63 shelters, most of them in person, several of them from paper records in a filing cabinet. Knows what every organisation in the country calls a "foster".
Owns the React Native app on both platforms. Keeps a drawer of old Android devices and refuses to merge anything that is unusable on the worst one.
Redesigned the animal profile around the questions adopters actually ask first — energy, other pets, children, alone-time. Adoption enquiries per view went up 28%.
Built the follow-up cohort analysis that showed which parts of the matching flow predicted a return. Half his job is telling us which of our ideas did nothing.
Working with us
If you run a shelter or a foster network anywhere in Hungary, listing is free and onboarding takes about a day — get in touch. If you want to build this with us, the open roles are listed, and the engineering blog is an honest sample of the work.