Mark Cuban offered $1 million to a founder who went on to become 'No. 1 success' story of 'Shark Tank'
"Shark Tank" has been running for 16 seasons and in this long period, audiences have seen innovative ideas turn into successful brands and brilliant pitches either bagging big investments or being failed by numbers. When he went to “Shark Tank”, all Bruno Francois wanted was $90,000 for 5% equity in his app Cycloramic. It's an application that allows the phone to take 360-degree panoramic photos all by itself. Users don’t even need to touch their phones. This application uses the phone’s vibration, gyro, and compass to do one full rotation and take a beautiful panoramic photo. When this idea was presented on the popular reality TV show, every single Shark wanted to be a part.
Offers were flying at Bruno from everywhere at one point, the soft-spoken entrepreneur clearly seemed overwhelmed. There was a moment when Mark Cuban even offered a million dollars for 30% equity. The Cycloramic creator did not want to relinquish so much of his company, and hence he asked if Cuban would share a deal with Lori Greiner. The two sharks came to an agreement and offered $500,000 for a 15% equity. That was in the sweet spot for everyone involved and a deal was struck in 2013.
Fast forward to 2015 and Bruno was no longer in the app industry. He had launched a company called Car360 that year which specialized in using augmented reality technology and 3-D computer vision to allow people to take 360-degree photos of automobiles with a mobile phone as per a report in CNBC Make It. In 2017, he impressed Carvana CEO Ernie Garcia with a demo of this technology in hopes of getting a licensing deal. However, the Carvana boss liked it so much that he chose to buy the company altogether for a whopping $22 million.
“Bruno just may be the number-one success story out of ‘Shark Tank,‘” Cuban said about his former business partner. “Not necessarily that $22 million is the biggest acquisition. But the company basically had to reinvent itself and go from zero to $22 million. That’s the American dream; that’s the ‘Shark Tank’ dream. Well done.”
As for his move out of the app development industry, advancements in technology were the reason. Bruno had made Cycloramic based on the iPhone 5. He had even made a video about how to use the app which has received more than a million views on YouTube and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak gave his seal of approval to the product.
It made Cycloramic one of the most downloaded apps on the Apple Store for a short while. However, as the iPhones began to get more technologically advanced, Bruno knew he had to adapt or perish, and there was only so far he could go by making new apps each year. “I realized that launching app after app and expecting each to be successful was just a fantasy,” the founder said. “I decided to look for a way to offer technology with a recurrent revenue rather than that one-time download fee.”
So he changed his target customers from consumers to businesses. A product that could earn revenue from licensing rather than one-time downloads would be a lot more stable. As a result, Car360 was born, and today, that one mobile app on “Shark Tank” in 2013 has made Bruno Francois a millionaire.
