Why ex-agency leaders Varun Duggirala and Pooja Jauhari took EMoMe to Shark Tank India

For most of the last decade, Varun Duggirala and Pooja Jauhari were used to the opposite side of the room. Glass cabins. Global brands. The familiar choreography of agency life.

When they walked onto the Shark Tank stage pitching EMoMe, an animation-led children’s IP focused on life skills, and closed Rs 2 crore for 4% equity, it wasn’t reinvention. It was strategic exposure.

Second-time founders, married, parents, choosing to compress years of thinking into minutes and let the room decide what it was worth. 

As co-founder of The Glitch, he had helped shape a generation of digital-first brand thinking in India. Jauhari joined the agency early, rose to CEO, and stayed on after its acquisition by WPP, eventually becoming group CEO at VMLY&R.

For Jauhari, the decision to appear on the show had little to do with spectacle.

“As entrepreneurs, we have an obligation to our business to use a good platform to push our company forward,” she says. “To be on the national stage and talk about an IP universe that we’re building from India for the world.”

The platform mattered. So did the audience.

The US and UK are already significant markets for EMoMe. The Philippines is another growing pocket. India, until recently, made up only about 17% of their audience. Shark Tank offered something few platforms could. Eyeballs at scale.

“It was a very strategic decision,” she says. “We wanted to bring on eyeballs.”

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The hesitation of second-time founders was present. Duggirala admits they had discussed Shark Tank even before the outreach came in July last year. And there were apprehensions. “When you’re a second-time entrepreneur, you want to build something before you exit it,” he says. “You’re also putting yourself out there. You don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The process itself was methodical. An application form. An audition video. In EMoMe’s case, the audition featured their animated characters explaining the business. Then came a formal audition. Then more scrutiny.

“They were very in-depth in understanding every schematic of our business,” Duggirala says.

Jauhari remembers the moment it hit them.

“We were in that room with founders from all over the country,” she says. “And Varun and I looked at each other and said we can’t believe that just yesterday we were in corner offices working with brands all over the world. I was really proud of us.”

The time from application to shoot spanned a few months. Forms were filled in August. In-person rounds followed. On October 19, they received confirmation for the shoot. Filming happened in November.

Jauhari had never watched Shark Tank before that episode.

What helped was that they did not build a Shark Tank-specific pitch, but took to the stage the same strategy they had already shared with investors: Screen through YouTube content, Stage through play areas, and Shop through physical products.

“The three IPs are part of our strategy. It’s not something we prepared for Shark Tank,” she says. “It’s exactly the same strategy we narrated to our existing investors.”

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What surprised them was the absence of edits.

“There are no cuts,” she says. “You pitch your business and you are out. What you see on TV is what actually happened.”

Duggirala laughs about fumbling a word early in the pitch. “I genuinely did fumble,” he says. “And Pooja handled it better than I did. But they keep those moments in. It makes it very natural.”

The biggest shift was in the language.

“When you pitch to VCs, you add a lot of jargon,” he says. “Here, we had to do the opposite. You have to make it simple enough for anyone in the country to understand what you’re building.”

Production reinforced that constantly.

“Just no jargon,” Jauhari says. “It forces you to focus on the real stuff. If you can’t explain who you are in 30 seconds, it won’t fly.”

Choosing the right sharks was a thought-out strategy. EMoMe already has three venture capital firms on its cap table: DeVC, Whiteboard Venture Partners and Gruhas Collective Consumer Fund. The objective of Shark Tank, beyond visibility, was to bring on founders as investors.

“Large founders who can work with us on aspects that we really want,” Jauhari says.

Once offers came in, the decision became clear. They chose Aman Gupta and Namita Thapar. “We were pretty sure that’s the direction we were going to go in,” she says.

Their existing investors played an active role too, from compliance to workshopping how the business was presented. At this stage, Jauhari says, involvement matters more than distance.

What changed after the episode? The impact was immediate. Watch time is up. Indian viewership has grown beyond the earlier 17%. Globally, traction continues across the US, UK and East Asia.

Due diligence is currently underway. All numbers disclosed on the show have been submitted. The process, they hope, will close soon.