The tank smelled like desperation and ozone.
It’s the same routine every season. A couple of founders walk onto a soundstage in Mumbai, blinking against the studio lights, hoping to trade a slice of their soul for a check and a selfie with a billionaire. This time, it was Kotson’s turn. They aren't selling a subscription for artisanal beard oil or a D2C brand of flavored water. They make transformers. You know, those grey metal boxes on utility poles that hum until they explode during a monsoon.
Industrial hardware is a tough sell for reality TV. It’s not sexy. It’s heavy, it’s expensive, and it’s governed by the kind of math that makes most people’s eyes glaze over. But the Kotson team didn't come for a pity party. They came with big numbers and even bigger claims.
Aman Gupta didn’t look impressed. He sat there, shifting in his seat, the king of the "vibe check." He’s built an empire on making tech look cool, and he was struggling to find the lifestyle angle in a five-hundred-kilogram slab of copper and steel. For Aman, if you can’t put a logo on it and sell it to a teenager at a mall, it’s a hard sell. He started digging into the brand identity. Or the lack of one. He wanted to know why these guys thought they were special in a market crowded with legacy players who’ve been doing this since the British left.
Then came the friction.
The founders threw out a valuation that felt like it was pulled from a hat. They claimed their tech was a massive leap forward in energy efficiency—the kind of stuff that saves state governments millions. It sounded good. Too good.
Anupam Mittal leaned back. That’s the universal sign that someone is about to get their soul crushed by a spreadsheet. He didn’t care about the "mission" or the "vision." He wanted to see the unit economics. He started poking holes in their revenue projections like he was looking for a leak in a dam.
"You're saying you have no real competition?" Anupam asked. The sarcasm was thick enough to clog a radiator.
The founders tripped over their words. They tried to pivot. They talked about their "proprietary process." In the world of venture capital theater, "proprietary" is often code for "we do it slightly differently but don't have a patent." Anupam wasn't having it. He brought up the 15% margin gap that didn't make sense given their scale. He pushed them on why, if their tech was so much better, the big utility companies weren't already banging down their doors with blank checks.
The air in the room thinned. The founders started sweating under the LEDs. They tried to justify a price tag that felt like it belonged to a Silicon Valley AI startup, not a manufacturing unit in north India. There was a specific back-and-forth about a 12-crore debt on the books that the founders tried to gloss over as "working capital." Aman laughed. It wasn't a kind laugh. It was the laugh of a man who knows that debt isn't just a number—it's an anchor.
It’s a classic Shark Tank trap. Founders get drunk on their own Kool-Aid. They think that because they’ve survived three years of late-night shifts and supply chain nightmares, the world owes them a premium. But the sharks don't buy effort. They buy exits.
Aman’s critique was blunter. He essentially told them they were boring. Not the product—boring is fine if it’s profitable—but the pitch. He questioned their ability to scale a brand in a B2B space where the decision-makers are government bureaucrats who don't care about "innovation" as much as they care about the lowest bid. It was a cold shower for a team that clearly expected to be hailed as the saviors of the Indian power grid.
The grilling lasted longer than the edited segment suggests. You could see the fatigue in the founders' eyes. They came in looking for partners; they left looking like they’d just finished a deposition. The trade-off was clear: keep your "bold claims" and your dignity, or admit the math is fuzzy and maybe get a deal at a fraction of what you asked for.
By the end, the bravado had evaporated. The founders were left defending a business model that looked increasingly fragile under the harsh glare of Anupam’s interrogation. It wasn't just about transformers anymore. It was about whether they actually knew how to run a company, or if they were just really good at building boxes.
The cameras stopped rolling, the sharks checked their phones, and the Kotson guys walked off into the shadows of the wings. They still have their factory. They still have their transformers. But they learned a hard lesson about the difference between a good product and a good investment.
Is it a business, or is it just a very heavy hobby?