Whatever Happened To Bitsbox After Shark Tank?
By its very nature, "Shark Tank" can be an uncomfortable watch. It can be difficult seeing each entrepreneur confidently pitches their business to the panel of hosts, only to possibly face outright rejection. However, the proceedings got especially heated for one particular episode in 2017, when former Google employees Aidan Chopra and Scott Lininger pitched Bitsbox, a subscription box service aimed at teaching kids how to code through entertaining lessons.
In their segment of Season 8, Episode 17, Chopra and Lininger offered the Sharks a 3 percent equity in the company for $250,000, making every single one of them balk at the valuation and reject the proposal — that is, except for Chris Sacca, who counter offered that amount of money for a 20 percent equity. When the pair rejected his offer and attempted to re-bargain, Sacca grew personally offended, and ultimately withdrew. Suffice to say, things didn't go particularly well for Bitsbox on "Shark Tank."
Despite the lack of success that Bitsbox saw in securing financial support through "Shark Tank," the company is actually still around. It has worked through some triumphs and some challenges in the ensuing years, but the duo remains thankful for getting featured on "Shark Tank" — even if they were rather blindsided by the outcome.
Bitsbox is doing just fine
Bitsbox may not have secured funding directly through "Shark Tank," but the business actually did benefit from appearing on the show. In a blog post on the Bitsbox website titled "We didn't get a deal on Shark Tank, so why are we so happy?," Aidan Chopra said that the exposure proved invaluable to ultimately reaching their funding goals. "Not only did we end up raising the money we needed from non-celebrity investors, but the TV exposure gave us a boost that was bigger than we'd dared to dream," he wrote. "In the month after we aired, we more than tripled our business and vaulted into the top tier of companies that are teaching kids to code."
While the Bitsbox team saw immediate improvements after "Shark Tank," getting funding and expanding doesn't mean that things have been easy for the business in the time since. In a 2020 interview with Big Stories Small Businesses on Medium, Chopra noted that the company had raised $4 million since it was founded in 2014, which he described as "comparatively not a lot." He went on to reveal that, at the best of times, Bitsbox was only breaking even. "This is not a profitable business at the moment," he said.
Hoping to grow the business further, Bitsbox has expanded beyond its core subscription box offerings to directly target teachers and schools with relevant strands of curriculum. As of 2023, the company is still up-and-running, though only time will tell how things go for it as time runs on.