Die Höhle der Löwen — "The Lion's Den" — is Germany's version of Shark Tank, and its track record is unusually well-documented compared to most international adaptations, thanks to real academic and journalistic research into what actually happens to the show's funded startups. Here's the full picture, both in individual company stories and in the underlying statistics.
The success: Ankerkraut, from spice mixes to €12 million a year
The pitch: Ankerkraut, a handcrafted spice-mix company founded in 2013, pitched in Season 3 (2016) and secured a deal with prominent tech entrepreneur Frank Thelen.
What actually happened: With Thelen's backing, Ankerkraut expanded from spice mixes into teas, herbal blends, and advent calendars, growing into a roughly €12 million-a-year business. Full story in our dedicated Ankerkraut piece.
The failure: sleeperoo, a real deal that still went insolvent
The pitch: Karen Löhnert's sleeperoo, a sleeping-cube accommodation startup, secured a genuine, closed deal — €250,000 for 20% equity from longtime panelist Dagmar Wöhrl in 2018.
What actually happened: Unlike most of the collapsed-deal stories we've documented elsewhere, this one wasn't about a deal falling apart before money changed hands — the investment was real. Years later, a key investor failed to meet its payment obligations, and sleeperoo filed for insolvency, with a court-appointed administrator taking over within two weeks. Full story in our dedicated sleeperoo piece.
The statistics that make Die Höhle der Löwen unusual to analyze
This is the part of Die Höhle der Löwen's story that sets it apart from most other international versions of the format Talmyn has covered: real, published research exists tracking what actually happens to the show's funded startups at scale, rather than relying solely on individual case studies pieced together from press coverage.
Across the show's first eleven seasons, 53% of pitched businesses secured a deal with at least one investor — a genuinely high hit rate by the format's general standards. But that same research found startups that closed a deal on the show carried a 2.5% bankruptcy risk within twelve months, roughly double the 1.25% average bankruptcy rate across German companies generally. Looking at a larger sample across the show's first six seasons, researchers identified 42 of 372 total funded startups — more than 1 in 10 — that had gone insolvent.
What that statistic actually means
It would be easy to read "double the bankruptcy rate" as evidence the show itself causes failures, but that's very likely reversed causation, not a real effect of appearing on television. Companies willing to pitch on a televised investment show in the first place tend to be earlier-stage, higher-risk businesses than the average German company — the same underlying risk profile that would predict above-average failure rates whether or not the company ever appeared on Die Höhle der Löwen at all. The show doesn't necessarily make companies more likely to fail; it selects for the kind of early-stage company that was already more likely to fail regardless of the funding source.
Why this data matters beyond just Germany
Die Höhle der Löwen's published statistics give us the clearest quantified confirmation of a pattern Talmyn has observed anecdotally across every market covered so far — Australia, India, the UK, Canada, and the US. A completed, real, closed deal is not a guarantee of survival, let alone success. Sleeperoo's real €250,000 investment and subsequent insolvency is exactly the kind of outcome the German statistics predict should happen with some regularity — not the exception the framing of most "whatever happened after" coverage implies, but a documented, expected minority outcome even among funded companies.
A quick primer on the show itself
Die Höhle der Löwen has aired on the German network VOX since 2014, using the same Shark Tank/Dragons' Den format licensed to markets worldwide, with a rotating panel of German investors referred to as "Löwen" (lions). Alongside Frank Thelen and Dagmar Wöhrl, the panel has included several other prominent German entrepreneurs and investors across its run, and the show has become one of German business television's most consistently discussed programs — helped in no small part by the kind of rigorous, published outcome tracking that most international versions of this format simply don't have available in the same depth.
The bottom line
Ankerkraut and sleeperoo represent the two real poles of Die Höhle der Löwen's track record: one company that turned a Frank Thelen deal into a genuinely large, diversified food brand, and another that took real money from Dagmar Wöhrl and still filed for insolvency years later. With over half of pitches securing funding but funded startups facing roughly double Germany's national bankruptcy rate, the German show's own numbers confirm what individual company stories across every other market keep suggesting: getting funded is the beginning of the real risk, not the end of it.
See our companion pieces for the full picture: where Shark Tank and Dragons' Den operate around the world, and our UK, Canada, Australia, and India roundups.
