Ashneer Grover reveals if the sharks got ₹10 lakh for each episode of Shark Tank: ‘Worked like bonded labour’

BharatPe’s co-founder and former managing director Ashneer Grover appeared on the first season of Shark Tank India, as one of the seven investors. At a recent event, Ashneer spoke about how much money were the Sharks of the show were paid for their appearances.  Also Read: Shark Tank’s Ashneer Grover says Vineeta Singh was his ‘hot junior’ at IIM: ‘We exchanged flirtatious glances’

Ashneer recently gave a lecture at Lovely Professional University. Talking about the show, he revealed that the show’s audition took place at his home and joked about the makers of the show, “bade gareeb log hain (these people are poor).”

He added, “None of us went with the intention of making money. Let me tell you the truth, none of us made any money from the show. Some people said that we made ₹10 lakh per episode, but I’d have been happy with even ₹5 lakh. The concept of the show is very simple; they believe we have money, and they felt that we all have high-value startups, we’d be able to invest some money on the show. So, they asked us to commit to spending ₹10 crore each on the show. We said okay. We weren’t paid anything for any episode; in fact, we worked like bonded labour for hours and hours.”

Ashneer had resigned from his post as managing director of BharatPe in March after allegations of misappropriations of funds. He and wife Madhuri Jain Grover were later removed from the company’s board as well.

Ashneer was one of the seven judges on Shark Tank India along with Peyush Bansal (CEO and co-founder of Lenskart), Anupam Mittal (founder and CEO of Shaadi.com), Vineeta Singh (CEO and co-founder of SUGAR Cosmetics), Namita Thapar (executive director of Emcure Pharmaceuticals), Aman Gupta (co-founder and chief marketing officer at boAt), and Ghazal Alagh (co-founder of MamaEarth).