Matthew Perry

Matthew Perry is the founder of TailHarbor, the most comprehensive cross-border pet-adoption platform in Europe. TailHarbor aggregates adoptable animals from rescue shelters across 40 countries, more than 138,000 animals from over 3,900 shelters, into one searchable place: scraping shelter websites daily, translating every listing, and surfacing animals that would otherwise stay invisible across the continent’s many languages.

He built TailHarbor in 2026, drawing on a decade spent launching and scaling operations across Europe. As a Senior International Expansion Manager at TIER Mobility he led market launches across Italy, Sweden, Ireland, the UK and Denmark; as General Manager at Lime he built one of the company’s largest markets in under a year. That blend of international operations and hands-on technical work (APIs, data pipelines, AI agents) is what lets a 40-country, multilingual aggregator run as a near-solo build.

Why this exists

The platform is, in many ways, built in memory of Oena, the shelter dog Matthew met while volunteering at the Jackson/Teton County Animal Shelter in Wyoming, and adopted two years later. She was his closest companion across the US, Canada and Europe for nearly a decade, until she passed in 2020. Knowing how long a good dog can wait unseen is exactly why he built a place to help them be found.

What he can speak to

TailHarbor’s continent-wide, real-time view gives Matthew a perspective no single shelter or national charity has: which animals wait longest for a home, how adoption demand shifts by season, and how rescue animals move from high-intake countries to adopters abroad. He is based in Innsbruck, Austria, and is available to comment on pet adoption, animal welfare, cross-border rescue, and the data behind Europe’s rescue landscape.

More about the platform itself on the About TailHarbor page.