Amber, the secure phone charging station from Shark Tank, is worth $0. The company shut down in 2015 without ever delivering a paid unit, and no shark invested. The $1 million valuation from the episode was an asking price, not a completed deal. Here is what Amber was, why the pitch fell apart, and where the numbers stand now.
What is Amber’s net worth today?
Zero. Amber has no product on sale, no customers, no revenue and no operating company behind it. Net worth is simply what a business owns minus what it owes, and a startup that stopped trading with unsold prototypes and unpaid setup costs lands at nothing, or a little below it.
There was also no asset base to survive the shutdown. No patents being licensed out, no warehouse of stock, no venue contracts worth selling on. The website and social accounts went quiet in late 2014 and stayed quiet. You cannot buy an Amber charging station today, new or used, because barely any were built to sell.
Neither founder walked away with a payout either. There was no acquisition, no licensing deal and no money from the show, so their shares tracked the company itself straight down to nothing.
What Amber actually was
Amber was a locking phone charging station built for public venues. Think of a cabinet roughly the size of a large toaster, with about seven separate compartments, each behind its own door. You slid your phone into a slot, registered your thumbprint on the built-in scanner, and the door locked. The same fingerprint was the only thing that opened it again.
The idea came from Bill Shuey in late 2013, after his phone died while he was out at a bar near campus in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He was studying political science at James Madison University. He pulled in Kyle Byrd, an industrial design major, to design and build the unit. Both finished their degrees in 2014.
The paying customer was never the phone owner. Restaurants, bars, movie theaters, museums and airports would buy a unit outright for about $2,000, or lease one for $150 a month. Charging stayed free for guests, and the venue got the foot traffic, the goodwill, and a customer database built from the sign-ins.
The Shark Tank pitch, in numbers
Shuey and Byrd filmed their pitch in Los Angeles in June 2014, and it aired on September 26, 2014 as the Season 6 premiere. They asked for $200,000 for 20% of the company, which puts the asking valuation at $1 million. They walked out with nothing.
| Detail | Figure |
|---|---|
| Aired | Season 6, Episode 1, September 26, 2014 |
| The ask | $200,000 |
| Equity offered | 20% |
| Implied valuation | $1 million |
| Price to a venue | About $2,000 per unit |
| Lease option | $150 per month |
| Cost to build | About $1,000 per unit |
| Revenue at the time | $0 |
| Outcome | No deal, all five sharks out |
Why the sharks passed
The unit economics did most of the damage. Each station cost around $1,000 to build and sold for $2,000, so an outright sale left roughly $1,000 before overheads, warranty and support. On the lease plan, $150 a month meant close to seven months of payments just to cover the build cost of that one machine, and $1,800 a year after that. The model only worked if venues signed on and stayed on for years, with the hardware holding up the whole time.
The bigger issue was traction. Amber was pre-revenue on the day it pitched: no orders, no paying pilot venues, nothing to show that a restaurant owner would hand over $2,000 for this. A $1 million price tag on zero sales is a hard argument in front of investors who price on proof.
There were doubts about the hardware too. A low-cost fingerprint scanner guarding a cabinet full of $600 phones invited questions about theft and liability, and venues already had a cheaper answer sitting behind the bar: a spare charging cable. The pitch ended fast, and all five sharks were out.
What happened to Amber after the show aired
The founders kept pushing for a while. They cut the monthly lease price and added a pay-per-use option so customers could pay at the machine instead of the venue carrying the cost. Manufacturers and distributors got in touch after the broadcast. Buyers did not.
Amber closed about a year and a half after the taping, in 2015, having never shipped a unit to a paying venue. The site came down, the accounts stopped posting, and the company was finished.
That ending is more ordinary than television makes it look. Of the U.S. private-sector businesses that opened in March 2013, only 34.7% were still trading ten years later, and the steepest fall came in the first year alone, when the survival rate dropped by more than 20 percentage points.
Valuation and net worth are two different numbers
Valuation is a price someone proposes. Net worth is what is left once the debts are paid. Amber had a valuation for one hour of television and a net worth of zero for everything after.
A valuation is the price put on the whole business, usually the one on the table in a negotiation. Amber’s came from simple arithmetic: $200,000 for 20% implies $1 million for 100%. Nobody agreed to pay it. Net worth comes off a balance sheet instead, assets minus liabilities, and a company that never sells anything has almost nothing on the asset side.
The same episode shows the gap perfectly. Bombas pitched socks that night and closed a deal with Daymond John for $200,000 at 17.5%, a valuation slightly above $1.1 million and not far off Amber’s ask. Bombas has since passed $2 billion in lifetime sales and stands as the highest-earning business in the show’s history. Same night, same size of investment, opposite outcome.
What happened to the founders
Neither founder stayed in the charging business. Kyle Byrd moved into product design and later into product management roles at software companies. Bill Shuey moved into sales. Amber was the first company either of them started, and it has stayed closed.
Other companies called Amber
Two unrelated businesses carry the same name, and both are worth real money.
Amber Enterprises India (NSE: AMBER) is the bigger one. It began in Jalandhar, Punjab in 1990 and builds air conditioners and components for other brands rather than selling under its own label. It listed on the Indian exchanges in January 2018 and carried a market value of roughly ₹25,000 crore in August 2026, close to $3 billion. Quarterly results and filings sit on its investor relations site.
Amber International Holding (Nasdaq: AMBR) is a Singapore-based digital asset firm operating as Amber Premium, part of Amber Group. Its market value has run in the low hundreds of millions of dollars through 2026, a long way below its early 2025 level.
Neither has any link to the Shark Tank company.
Frequently asked questions
Did Amber get a deal on Shark Tank?
No. Bill Shuey and Kyle Byrd asked for $200,000 for 20% of Amber, and all five sharks passed. They left the tank with no offer on the table and no investment from the show.
Is Amber still in business?
No. Amber closed in 2015, about a year and a half after filming, and never shipped a unit to a paying venue. The website and social accounts have been inactive since then, so there is nothing to buy.
How much was Amber valued at on Shark Tank?
The $200,000-for-20% ask implied a $1 million valuation. That was the founders’ asking price rather than an agreed one, so the company was never actually priced at $1 million by an outside investor.
Why did Amber fail?
Cost and demand. Each unit cost about $1,000 to build against a $2,000 sale price, and the company had no revenue when it pitched. Venues never bought in the numbers the model needed.
Which company named Amber is actually worth billions?
Amber Enterprises India, listed as AMBER on India’s NSE. It manufactures air conditioners and components for other brands and held a market value near $3 billion in August 2026. It has no connection to the Shark Tank business.
Conclusion
Amber is worth nothing today. The company carried a $1 million asking valuation onto Shark Tank in September 2014, left without a deal, and closed within about 18 months without shipping a single paid unit. There is no revenue, no product and no entity left to value, which is why every current figure lands at zero. If you were after a different Amber, look at Amber Enterprises India or Amber International instead.
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