Shark Tank’s Ashneer Grover says Vineeta Singh was his ‘hot junior’ at IIM: ‘We exchanged flirtatious glances’

Ashneer Grover, co-founder and former managing director of fintech platform BharatPe appeared on the first season of Shark Tank India, as one of the seven investors. At a recent event, Ashneer spoke about his co-judge Vineeta Singh and others. Also Read: Shark Tank India’s Ashneer Grover reacts to YouTuber Ashish Chanchlani’s spoof Sasta Shark Tank: ‘What acting’

Ashneer gave a lecture at Lovely Professional University recently, and talked about his co-judges. He said, “I knew Anupam from before. I’d pitched him an idea once, and in the month that he took to get back to me, I accepted somebody else’s investment, so I ended up saying no to him. Vineeta was my junior in IIM; we never spoke but had exchanged flirtatious glances. She was one of those ‘hot juniors’. Aman is a great guy, our ‘auditions’ for the show were held together at my place. Peyush everybody knew from Lenskart, and Namita I met for the first time on the show.”

He also talked about his experience on the show. He said, “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 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).