Shark Tank-ed?: Ashneer Grover, Anupam Mittal, honoured least number of Shark Tank deals; Namita Thapar tops list

PrivateCircle, a private market intelligence platform revealed that Namita Thapar, executive director of Emcure Pharmaceuticals, was bestowed with the most number of deals as a shark (investor/judge) during the first edition of Shark Tank. Other sharks including Ashneer Grover, Peyush Bansal and Anupam Mittal were at the bottom of the list collated by PrivateCircle.

The data, based on MCA filings till July 12, 2023, revealed that Thapar, honoured 13 of the 22 deals which led to a conversion rate of 59 percent - the highest among the seven sharks who featured in the show’s first season. Mamaearth’s Ghazal Alagh was the second on the list of best-performing sharks (in terms of the investment rate). Alagh had a conversion rate of 57 percent after she funded four of the seven companies she had promised monies. Boat’s Aman Gupta was the third-best performing shark as he invested in 12 of the 28 startups he had committed funds to which translates to an investment rate of 43 percent.

"...(some) companies were not structured to accept money (because) they were not private limited companies. In one case it wasn’t even a proprietorship and had no tax records. We provided legal consultants and paid for it but even after nine months of following up we did not see them taking action," Alagh told Moneycontrol when asked why some deals fell through.

Findings also revealed that Mittal, who runs Shaadi.com, invested only in seven companies even after he committed to 24 startups which put him at the bottom of the table with a conversion rate of just 29 percent.

In a Moneycontrol report last month, several founders alleged that sharks made offers only on air and that a majority of them were not fulfilled outside of the show. Refuting those claims, sharks said that deals were falling through because multiple founders changed their terms later, and asked for more money because they were talking to investors outside of Shark Tank who offered them more investments.

In total, sharks committed a total of Rs 40 crore to 65 companies during the first season but invested only Rs 17 crore across 27 startups till July 12, 2023, which translates to a success rate of only 42.5 percent, PrivateCircle said. The debt rounds were not taken into consideration for the study.

Meanwhile, 166 startups had pitched on Shark Tank India season 2, and 115 of them got a deal commitment on the show but only one of them has made investment filings till now. “It is possible that the due diligence is pending for the Season 2 companies and so we expect more startups to get committed funding from the sharks in the coming months,” PrivateCircle study concluded.