LARQ founder Justin Wang pitched a self-cleaning water bottle — a UV-C light built into the cap that neutralizes bacteria at the press of a button — on Shark Tank’s twelfth season, asking for $500,000 for 1% equity, a $50 million valuation. Lori Greiner and Kevin O’Leary teamed up on air and offered $1 million for 4%, splitting the investment. It’s the kind of moment the show is built around: a big number, two sharks agreeing to partner, a founder walking away with a life-changing headline deal.

What the cameras don’t show

Shark Tank deals are provisional on the day they’re filmed — the sharks’ offers are subject to due diligence after the cameras stop rolling, and a meaningful share of on-air deals never actually close once the sharks look closely at the company’s real financials, cap table, or growth trajectory. LARQ is one of those cases: the Greiner/O’Leary deal fell through during due diligence and never closed, according to Wang’s own later account.

What happened without the Shark Tank money

A deal falling through after filming is often treated as the end of the story for a company’s press coverage — the exciting headline moment happened, the follow-up rarely gets written. LARQ’s actual trajectory went the other direction: Wang raised more than $10 million in outside venture funding independent of the show, according to Crunchbase’s tracked funding rounds, and built real retail distribution into Best Buy, Bloomingdale’s, and Williams Sonoma — a notably higher-end retail footprint than most direct-to-consumer Shark Tank alumni achieve.

The acquisition

In early 2024, LARQ was acquired by Brita — the water-filtration brand best known for pitcher filters — a genuinely significant outcome for a company whose television deal never even closed. The acquisition folded LARQ’s self-cleaning bottle technology into a much larger, established consumer-goods company with far greater retail reach than LARQ could have built alone.

The actual lesson in the deal

The LARQ story is a useful corrective to how Shark Tank deals get reported: the on-air handshake is a real event, but it’s not the outcome. A company whose television deal fell apart in due diligence still ended up with a strong acquisition a few years later, built on outside capital the sharks had nothing to do with. The exposure from the episode — millions of viewers seeing the product demonstrated — appears to have mattered more to LARQ’s growth than the specific financing that never actually landed.

Is LARQ still in business?

Yes. Despite the Brita acquisition, LARQ, Inc. remains an independent legal entity operating under its own brand, with Justin Wang continuing to lead the company as of early 2026. Its self-cleaning bottles are still sold through major retailers, including Amazon, Target and Apple.com, alongside LARQ’s own site.

Is Justin Wang still LARQ’s CEO?

Yes, according to Wang’s own public profile and current reporting, he continues to lead LARQ post-acquisition rather than exiting the company once the Brita deal closed — a genuinely different outcome from many startup acquisitions, where the founder departs once the deal is done.

What is LARQ, or Justin Wang, actually worth?

There’s no verified, disclosed figure here, and it’s worth being direct about that rather than repeating an unsourced number as fact. Brita has not publicly disclosed the acquisition price. Various online estimates of Wang’s personal net worth range anywhere from roughly $5 million to $30 million — a wide enough spread to signal that these are outside estimates based on LARQ’s general growth and funding history, not disclosed financial data. Treat any single specific figure you see elsewhere with real skepticism until a primary source discloses one.

See LARQ’s full company profile on Talmyn.