Is Shark Tank India Rigged? Anupam Mittal Answers It!

Shark Tank India Season 3 has got off to a good start with budding entrepreneurs coming up with their creative pitches. The sharks however were accused of not living up to their promises to the pitchers once the deals were struck during an episode.

Reportedly, many of the deals didn’t go through even after a year of the episode airing.  Shaadi.com founder Anupam Mittal spoke to Mint to reveal what goes behind the seasons at the show which returned for a third season in January 2024.

Mittal told Mint that the execution of a deal takes from a month to more than a year to come to its fruition. And that depends on “how ready the company is” for funding.

Anupam Mittal explains Shark Tank procedure

Explaining the process, he said, “Our teams get in touch with the founders and then typically we create a WhatsApp group. We start the diligence process and paperwork parallelly and connect with them to flag issues – if they’ve not met the conditions or if the claims are wrong. And then we wait for them to complete the process. Some of them do, some of them never come back to us.”

He gave an example of a Jaipur-based company Zillionaire that got Rs 1 crore from Mittal in season 2 even though their original ask was Rs 50 lakh, the Shaadi(dot)com founder revealed that it took six to seven months for the deal to go through. “Those guys didn’t even have a company formed. And the ROC website was down for three months. My team was helping them and trying to find other ways…going directly to the registrar company…but for three months it was impossible to register a new company.”

Pitchers and valuations

Anupam also explained that 90% of the time, the reason behind a deal falling through is the pitchers themselves and, more often than not, back out. He said, “90% of the time…if a deal does not happen after the initial commitment…it’s because the founder backed out because they think they got a better valuation outside. Let’s say we commit to 20 deals and 10 go through. Out of the 10 that did not go through at least seven or eight will be cases where the founder has backed out. And you’ll have two, three instances where the claims were not correct or the requisite conditions were not met.”

The latest season features a 12-judge panel with Anupam Mittal, Aman Gupta, Amit Jain, Namita Thapar, Peyush Bansal and Vineeta Singh in their roles. There are also new deal structures on the table including royalty on sales.

FAQs

Where can I watch Shark Tank India ?

Sony Liv airs Shark Tank India.

When did Shark Tank India season 3 start airing?

Shark Tank India Season 3 started streaming from January 22, 10 PM onwards.

How much has Anupam Mittal invested in pitches from Shark Tank India?

The Shaadi.com founder is believed to have invested around 12 crores during the first two seasons of Shark Tank.