Yes, Hug Sleep got a deal on Shark Tank, and a better one than it asked for. Matt Mundt and his wife, Angie Kupper, walked into Season 12, Episode 3 (first aired on ABC on October 30, 2020) asking for $150,000 for 10% of the company that makes the Sleep Pod, a stretchy, full-body wrap usually described as an “adult swaddle.” All five Sharks made offers, and the couple left with $300,000 for 20% from Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner. Six years on, the company is still selling Sleep Pods from its own site and on Amazon. What is harder to pin down is how big it has become, because almost every number in the public record comes from the founder or from the show itself.
Did Hug Sleep get a deal on Shark Tank?
The basic facts come from the founder’s hometown business paper and his university. BizTimes Milwaukee reported on November 2, 2020 that Mundt had asked for $150,000 for 10%, that all five Sharks made offers, and that he closed on air with Cuban and Greiner at $300,000 for 20%. The Milwaukee School of Engineering, his alma mater, described the same outcome in March 2021 as a bidding war among all five Sharks that ended with “new business partners Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner.” Looper’s later recap of the episode adds that the other three Sharks (Kevin O’Leary, Daymond John and Robert Herjavec) put in a matching joint offer, and that the couple picked the pair they had wanted from the start.
The arithmetic is the part most recaps of the Hug Sleep Shark Tank pitch skip. $150,000 for 10% and $300,000 for 20% both value the business at $1.5 million. Mundt did not trade valuation for a celebrity; he kept the price and took twice the money, and twice the dilution, to get two Sharks instead of one. (You can check any ask this way with our post-money valuation calculator; for how that kind of number is set, see our guide on how to value a startup.)
Whether the deal closed on exactly those terms is not on the public record. Neither the company nor the investors have published final terms. What is documented is a continuing relationship: Sleepopolis reported in October 2022 that the couple still talk to both investors regularly (“Both of them are just business titans,” Mundt told the site), and that Cuban told viewers on a later episode, “I literally use it every night. I sleep so much better in my Hug Sleep.”
Who founded Hug Sleep
Mundt is a 2014 mechanical-engineering graduate of the Milwaukee School of Engineering who, according to the school, had worked as a product designer at Harley-Davidson and Apple. He started Hug Sleep as a side project in 2019 while working at Foxconn. The problem was his own. “Very quickly I found this very expensive weighted blanket folded up on my closet floor never to be used again,” he told BizTimes in October 2020; the blanket helped, but it was hot and, the paper said, weighed 20 to 25 pounds. The Sleep Pod was his attempt to get the same pressure from stretch fabric instead of weight.
The company’s own founders page credits Kupper as a co-founder and says she has a master’s degree in community psychology and about ten years in mental health care; MSOE described her as a mental health therapist. Mundt told BizTimes that it was only after he made one for her, and she loved it, that selling them became the plan.
Two dates matter more than the origin story. Google Patents lists a “body compression sleepwear” patent (US 10,463,179) with Matthew J. Mundt as inventor, filed March 11, 2019 and granted that November, with Hug Sleep Inc. recorded as assignee in 2021. And Mundt told CBS 58 in 2023 that the pandemic layoff in early 2020 was what pushed him in: “I was laid off. I was really forced to take this full-time.” He also said someone working on the show messaged them and encouraged them to pitch, which suggests the show found Hug Sleep rather than the other way round.
What happened to Hug Sleep after Shark Tank
According to CBS 58, the company had about $490,000 in sales after roughly 16 months when it went on the show. BizTimes reported in March 2021 that it had planned to sell 2,500 to 5,000 units after the broadcast, roughly what it had sold in its whole life to that point, and instead sold out its entire inventory of 50,000 units within the first weeks. Its local manufacturer went from making up to 200 units a week to about 10,000 a week and hired 12 people. “It was a true 10x of a company overnight,” Mundt told the paper. “It was pretty chaotic, but definitely a good problem to have.”
MSOE put the result at $4 million in sales in the final months of 2020. The show brought the couple back for an update segment in the same season, on March 12, 2021, which the school called rare; they used it to introduce a second-generation pod with more sizes and a design that let the wearer put both legs out. BizTimes reported that the new version, the Sleep Pod Move, launched that week.
What the sales numbers do and don’t show
Hug Sleep is private and has not published audited results, so the growth story is a ladder of claims from different speakers and dates:
- About $490,000 in lifetime sales at the time of the pitch (CBS 58, 2023, describing 2020).
- $4 million by the end of 2020 (BizTimes and MSOE, March 2021).
- $15 million in sales since the first appearance, a figure Sleepopolis says the Sharks cited on air in a later episode (October 2022).
- About $25 million in lifetime sales. “We’re about to cross $25 million dollars in lifetime sales in under four years so it’s a dream come true,” Mundt told CBS 58 in March 2023, adding that more than 250,000 units had sold.
Those figures hang together reasonably well. A quarter of a million units at the roughly $90 to $100 the site charges for its core adult pods today lands in the same range as $25 million. But they are all the company’s, or the show’s, account of itself, and we found no figure from any source after March 2023. The website currently advertises “800,000+,” “900,000+” and “400,000+” happy customers in different places on the same pages, which is a reason not to lean on any of them.
Is Hug Sleep still in business, and who owns it now?
Yes, as of October 23, 2026. Hugsleep.com is live under a 2026 copyright notice for Hug Sleep Inc., running a fall sale and listing adult, hooded, kids’ and toddler pods alongside pillows and a sleep mask; the adult Sleep Pod is listed at $89.99. It lists three U.S. patents on its products. On Amazon, the Hug Sleep Hooded Sleep Pod listing shows Hug Sleep as the seller. In 2023 CBS 58 reported that the pods were still made by a Milwaukee-based manufacturer, and BizTimes gave the company’s address in 2021 as Brookfield, Wisconsin.
On ownership, we found no record of a sale, merger or new outside round. On the public record the founders still run it. The stake Cuban and Greiner ended up with when the deal closed has not been disclosed, and neither has the company’s current size.
What founders can take from it
First, a bidding war is leverage you can spend on money rather than on price. Hug Sleep held its valuation at $1.5 million and doubled the check, which also doubled the dilution; that was a choice about how much capital the spike would need, and the 50,000-unit sellout suggests it was the right one. Second, the unglamorous work came before the cameras: a patent application filed in March 2019, the month after the couple launched (per CBS 58), and a local manufacturer able to go from 200 units a week to 10,000. Third, the product came from the founder’s own bad nights and a $2,500 start, per Looper’s recap of the pitch, not from a market map. And finally, read “lifetime sales” claims for what they are: unaudited, rounded, and usually from the person with the most reason to round up.
Hug Sleep is one of four deals in our sample whose final terms were never published; see Shark Tank deals by the numbers.
