Is Shark Tank 3 ‘scripted’ or are deals actually struck? Anupam Mittal answers

Shark Tank India’s previous seasons have seen the judges pledge over ₹120 crore to contestants and their companies. Some, later insisted that they did not receive funds. Now, 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. 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.
On the execution process of the deals, Anupam Mittal said that it can take anywhere between a month to more than a year depending on “how ready the company is” for funding. The Shaadi.com founder 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.”
On Jaipur-based Zillionaire which walked away with an investment of ₹1 crore from Anupam Mittal during Season 2, he said, “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.”
He explained, “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.”