What Happened To The Validated App From Shark Tank Season 8?

Season eight of Shark Tank featured many memorable pitches, including one from Famous Amos Cookie founder Wally Amos, another from two Harvard graduates featuring chips made from cricket flour, and a vibrating mat meant to calm crying infants. Several of the season eight apps were for iPhone and Android apps, including one to help prevent cyberbullying and another that linked to a stuffed toy and allowed children to send and receive electronic messages. 

Another app pitch came in Episode 21 from Portland, Oregon entrepreneurs Ian Lyman, Tov Arneson, and Alex Wilhelm, a trio Mark Cuban jokingly dubbed "The Drew Carey triplets." Their pitch was for an app called Validated, which provided shoppers at participating merchants in Portland and Seattle with rewards that could be redeemed for credits for parking and transportation services. 

The Sharks received the pitch with a mix of confusion and disdain, with some of them commenting that the system was unnecessarily complicated.

"You have so many integration points with all the different participants," Cuban said. "It's burdensome, and there's going to be ongoing bugs forever. That makes it more expensive. So, for those reasons, I'm out."  Barbara Corcoran didn't see a need for the system, and Kevin O'Leary called Validated "a dog." 

Lori Greiner saw promise in the concept but didn't like the app itself, and guest shark Chris Sacca especially hated the app's reliance on QR codes, crassly comparing them to a sexually transmitted infection. Ultimately, the trio left without securing any funding, so what was the ultimate fate of the Validated app?

The Validated pitch episode of Shark Tank aired in April 2017, and things appeared promising for the company in May 2019 when Validated was acquired by Reach Now; the car-sharing company formed when BMW's enterprise in that arena merged with Daimler's Car2go. Unfortunately for Lyman, Arneson, and Wilhelm, however, that acquisition did not provide Validated with enough capital to keep the app in business for long. Just a month later, the company went out of business, and the app is no longer available on the Apple or Google Play stores.

The sharks' caution two years earlier saved each of them $250,000; that was the sum the Validated founders sought for an 8% stake in their company. While the panel of investors may have correctly assessed the system as too complicated, Sacca was certainly wrong in his disdain for QR codes. Now, the fuzzy squares are commonly used as advertising tools and even in restaurants as links to menus.