Trippie did not get a Shark Tank deal. Ryan Diew walked into the Tank asking for $100,000 for 10% of his airport-navigation app, putting Trippie’s implied valuation at $1 million. The Sharks all passed.
That would normally be the end of the story. It wasn’t.
Within months, Diew had taken Trippie from four airports to 22, and he said those U.S. airports represented 82% of domestic air traffic. The app also received a major burst of attention immediately after its episode aired, with Colgate University reporting nearly 12,000 downloads in the hours after the broadcast before Diew’s rented server crashed under the traffic. (colgate.edu)
Years later, Trippie is still listed on Apple’s App Store. But the company’s present-day picture is considerably less straightforward than many “Shark Tank update” sites suggest.
Trippie was barely a business when Ryan Diew entered the Tank
Diew developed Trippie while studying computer science and playing Division I basketball at Colgate University. The original idea came from an airport layover: he wanted to find food without dragging his bags around or risking missing his flight. The concept evolved from airport food delivery into something broader, an interactive map and information layer for large airports. (colgate.edu)
By the time he appeared on Shark Tank in 2017, the product was operating in only four airports.
Diew's ask was straightforward: $100,000 for 10% equity. His pitch effectively valued the young company at $1 million. Business2Community's subsequent interview with Diew confirms those terms and records his explanation that he had built the functioning app with limited time and resources while balancing school and college athletics. (business2community.com)
The Sharks saw the problem differently.
Lori Greiner questioned whether Trippie was solving the right problem. Robert Herjavec questioned its competitive advantage. Mark Cuban viewed the product as too early to constitute a substantial business. None of the five Sharks made an offer. (business2community.com)
The most memorable part of the pitch came after the rejections. Diew said he did not have a “rich uncle” helping him finance the company, a comment that irritated several of the Sharks. Cuban ultimately told him to stop patting himself on the back, while also challenging him to prove the Sharks wrong. (business2community.com)
Diew left without the $100,000.
He did not leave without momentum.
The Shark Tank episode produced a real, measurable spike
The immediate aftermath is one of the better-documented parts of the Trippie story.
Colgate reported that Trippie received nearly 12,000 downloads after the episode aired, enough traffic to overwhelm the web server Diew had rented. The app briefly reached No. 21 in Apple's Travel category on the Monday after the broadcast. (colgate.edu)
More importantly, the product itself was expanding.
When the episode was filmed, Trippie covered four airports. By the time Diew spoke to Business2Community, it was available in 22 major hub airports worldwide, and he said the U.S. airports covered by the service accounted for 82% of domestic air traffic. (business2community.com)
That number matters because some later summaries compress the company's expansion into a generic claim that it “went global.” Diew's own contemporary account is more useful: four airports had become 22 in less than four months.
The company also reported reaching 50,000 users during the following period. That figure appears in a contemporaneous LinkedIn post from Diew and Trippie's account, rather than a later Shark Tank database estimate. (linkedin.com)
For a company the Sharks had just considered too early, that was meaningful progress.
Trippie kept building after the rejection
Diew's response to the Shark Tank criticism was not to abandon the product.
In his post-show interview, he said the company planned to keep evolving and expanding. He also acknowledged that he had lost his composure during the pitch and said the experience had taught him a lesson about handling pressure. (business2community.com)
The product continued to receive updates over the next several years.
Apple's current version history provides a useful record because it is harder to confuse with recycled Shark Tank claims. Trippie added airports in 2019, redesigned its maps in January 2020, added airport restaurant ratings, and continued issuing bug fixes and airport updates in 2021. In August and October 2022, the app added new maps, flight tracking and TSA wait times. (apps.apple.com)
Then came a more substantial refresh in 2024.
In September and October 2024, Trippie released version 2.0, added travel-planning functionality branded as Tern, introduced real-time flight arrivals and departures, and added 50-plus major airports worldwide. Two subsequent updates in December added another 40 airports and 15 more airports respectively. (apps.apple.com)
So the claim that Trippie simply disappeared after Shark Tank is not supported by the app's own version history.
The $3 million revenue story needs more caution
This is where the online Trippie story gets messy.
A number of recent Shark Tank update sites state that Trippie generates approximately $3 million a year or had reached $3 million in revenue by 2023. Some also assign the company a current value of $3.5 million or $4.5 million.
Those figures are widely repeated, but they are not supported by a current company financial statement, SEC filing, or similarly strong primary source that I could verify.
That distinction matters.
There is evidence that Trippie became materially larger than it was in 2017. There are also contemporary reports of its airport expansion and user growth. But a website estimating a private company's valuation is not the same thing as the company reporting that valuation.
So the safest version of the story is narrower: Trippie appears to have generated substantial traction after Shark Tank, but its current revenue and valuation cannot be independently established from the strongest available public evidence.
That is very different from saying the $3 million figure is definitely false. It simply means it should not be presented as audited fact.
Ryan Diew moved into venture capital while Trippie continued
There is another important part of the story that often gets buried beneath the Shark Tank drama.
Diew eventually became involved with Base Ventures, a seed-stage technology investment firm. His professional profiles have listed him as an Entrepreneur in Residence and later as a Principal/Partner, while also continuing to identify him with Trippie. (theorg.com)
Colgate also reported that Diew had joined the Kapor Center's Innovation Lab in 2018, where Trippie was part of the iLab cohort. (kaporcenter.org)
That makes the later Trippie story less like a conventional startup rocket ship and more like a founder gradually building a product while developing a broader career in technology and investing.
Diew's own 2019 LinkedIn post said that year had been a good one for Trippie and expressed optimism for 2020. (linkedin.com)
Then the travel industry hit a problem no airport app could easily work around.
COVID-19.
An app built around navigating crowded airports was operating in the exact environment that temporarily collapsed. Later accounts describe a slowdown during the pandemic, although precise revenue or user figures for that period are not publicly established. (sharktankblog.com)
Trippie is still on the App Store, but its current status is genuinely murky
As of August 2026, the strongest evidence that Trippie remains alive as a product is Apple's App Store listing.
Trippie: The Airport App is still available, is listed as free with in-app purchases, and is published by Trippie, Inc. Apple currently shows a 4.0-star rating from roughly 1,000 ratings. The app supports iPhone and iPad and requires iOS 15.4 or later. (apps.apple.com)
The pricing is also real and current on Apple's listing: $3.99 for a one-day Premium Pass, $9.99 for one month, and $59.99 for a year. (apps.apple.com)
But there is an important caveat.
The latest version shown in Apple's public history is version 2.2.1, released December 19, 2024. There is no 2025 or 2026 update shown there. (apps.apple.com)
The company's old website, trippie.co, is also no longer an active source of current company information. Contemporary reporting in 2024 and 2025 noted that the website had disappeared even though the app remained available. (sharktankblog.com)
That leaves Trippie in an unusual position: the product is still downloadable, but the public evidence of an actively operating, growing company is thin.
It would be a mistake to turn that into “Trippie is dead.” The App Store listing says otherwise.
It would be equally unjustified to call Trippie a thriving $3 million-a-year company in 2026 based solely on estimates repeated by Shark Tank update sites.
The evidence supports something more interesting.
Ryan Diew built Trippie from an airport problem he encountered as a college athlete, took a brutal rejection on national television, expanded the app dramatically afterward, survived a pandemic that directly attacked its market, and continued updating the product through the end of 2024. He also built a parallel career in venture capital.
The Sharks were right about one thing in 2017: Trippie was extremely early.
What happened afterward is harder to reduce to a clean Shark Tank success story. Trippie did not vanish, and it did not produce the kind of transparent public growth record that would justify every valuation and revenue number now circulating online.
The most defensible update in 2026 is simpler: Trippie is still on the App Store, its last recorded update was in December 2024, and the company's current operating scale is not publicly clear. The $100,000 investment Diew wanted never arrived. He built anyway.
