No, Ring did not get a deal on Shark Tank. In November 2013 Jamie Siminoff pitched it under its original name, DoorBot, asked for $700,000 for 10% and walked out with nothing after turning down Kevin O’Leary’s royalty offer. Less than five years later, on April 12, 2018, Amazon bought the company. The price is usually given as “$1 billion.” Amazon’s own annual report for 2018 gives a more precise figure: “cash consideration of approximately $839 million, net of cash acquired.” Ring is still in business in October 2026 as an Amazon brand, and Siminoff, who left in 2023, came back to Amazon in 2025 to run it again alongside Blink, Amazon Key and Sidewalk. It is the most expensive “no” in the show’s history, and the details are more instructive than the legend.
The Ring (DoorBot) Shark Tank pitch at a glance
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Episode | Season 5, Episode 9 (aired Nov. 15, 2013) |
| Pitched by | Jamie Siminoff |
| Ask | $700,000 for 10% (a $7 million valuation) |
| Sales claimed on air | About $1 million gross in the first nine months, at $199.99 a unit |
| Offer | Kevin O’Leary: $700,000 as a royalty deal (10%, falling to 7% after recoupment) plus 5% equity, per Fortune |
| Result | No deal |
| Acquired | By Amazon, April 12, 2018, for about $839 million net of cash acquired (Amazon 10-K) |
| Status, Oct. 2026 | Active Amazon brand |
What Jamie Siminoff pitched on Shark Tank
DoorBot was a Wi-Fi doorbell with a camera that let you answer the door from your phone. SlashGear’s account of the episode, which drew 6.48 million viewers, records the numbers Siminoff gave: about $1 million in gross sales in the first nine months, $250,000 in the most recent month, a $199.99 retail price and a landed cost of $81.83. Fortune reports that he had spent his last $20,000 building the pitch set. “I thought I had achieved the American Dream by being on Shark Tank,” he later told ABC.
Why the Sharks passed on DoorBot
Four Sharks went out for four different reasons, according to SlashGear. Lori Greiner didn’t see enough to justify a $200 price. Mark Cuban doubted it could scale. Daymond John worried that established home-security companies would crush it. Robert Herjavec thought it might be easier to hack than a hard-wired system. Kevin O’Leary was the only one to offer. Fortune describes his terms as $700,000 against a 10% royalty on sales that would fall to 7% once he had recouped his money, plus 5% of the equity. Siminoff said no.
In hindsight, three of the four objections were reasonable. Hackability turned out to be a real issue (see below). Competition from big security brands was real. What the Sharks underpriced was the size of the market and the possibility that a bigger company would want to own the product outright.
What happened to DoorBot after Shark Tank
The episode itself was worth money. Wikipedia, citing Siminoff, records his estimate that the appearance produced $5 million in additional sales. In September 2014 the company relaunched its hardware under a new name, Ring. Over the next few years it raised venture money from investors including Richard Branson, Goldman Sachs, Kleiner Perkins, Qualcomm Ventures and DFJ Growth, more than $200 million in total according to Forbes as cited by Wikipedia. Branson explained his investment in a 2015 statement: “What excites me about Ring is its efficient, convenient approach to crime prevention and home monitoring,” as quoted by Fortune.
Growth was not smooth. Siminoff told Fortune in 2019, “It turns out we were way over our skis,” and Inc. in 2018, “We were at that awkward adolescent phase.”
What Amazon actually paid for Ring
The “$1 billion” figure was widely reported when the deal was announced in early 2018, and it still appears in most recaps. Amazon never confirmed it in a press release. It did report the deal in its annual 10-K filing for 2018, which says:
“On April 12, 2018, we acquired Ring Inc. (“Ring”) for cash consideration of approximately $839 million, net of cash acquired.”
“Net of cash acquired” means the cash on Ring’s balance sheet was subtracted from the price, so the headline value of the deal was higher than $839 million by however much cash Ring had. The filing doesn’t say how much that was. The two numbers are therefore not necessarily in conflict, but $839 million is the only one Amazon has put its name to, and it is the one to quote.
Measured against the episode, the gap is easy to compute. The 10% Siminoff offered for $700,000 implied a $7 million company. Taking Amazon’s $839 million, the company was worth about 120 times that four and a half years later. Had O’Leary’s 5% equity stake survived later funding rounds without any dilution, which it would not have, it would have been worth about $42 million. Our post-money valuation calculator shows the 2013 arithmetic; the startup dilution calculator shows why the second number is an upper bound rather than an estimate.
Ring under Amazon: growth, privacy and a $5.8 million settlement
Ring became one of Amazon’s best-known device brands. Fortune, citing a 2023 Politico figure, says more than 10 million people have a Ring doorbell. It has also drawn scrutiny. On May 31, 2023 the Federal Trade Commission announced a proposed order requiring Ring to pay $5.8 million in consumer refunds. The FTC alleged that Ring let employees and contractors view customers’ private videos, that one employee watched thousands of recordings from bathrooms and bedrooms, and that Ring did not add multi-factor authentication until 2019, after attacks let hackers into roughly 55,000 U.S. customer accounts. “Ring’s disregard for privacy and security exposed consumers to spying and harassment,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. Herjavec’s hacking worry from the Tank, in other words, was not wrong.
Where Jamie Siminoff is now
Siminoff went back to Shark Tank in October 2018 as a guest Shark, the first former contestant to do so, in the Season 10 premiere. He stepped back from running Ring in 2023, when Liz Hamren became its CEO, and became CEO of the smart-lock company Latch, according to Fortune and SlashGear. In April 2025 he returned to Amazon as a vice president working with the Ring, Blink, Amazon Key and Sidewalk teams. “It was simply time for me to take a breath and explore the world beyond Ring,” he told Amazon’s news site about leaving.
Is Ring still in business, and who owns it?
Yes. Ring is a wholly owned Amazon business in October 2026, selling doorbells, cameras and alarm systems, with Siminoff back in a leadership role. Its products are sold directly by Amazon:
Ring Battery Doorbell on Amazon
What founders can take from it
First, a “no” on television is a data point, not a verdict. Siminoff’s pitch earned millions in sales from the exposure alone. Second, Shark Tank prices deals for a TV investor’s risk, not for venture outcomes. O’Leary’s royalty would have returned his money quickly; it would also have taxed a hardware company’s revenue for years while it needed every dollar to grow. Third, quote the filing, not the headline. The Ring sale is “the billion-dollar Shark Tank reject” in most retellings, but the only number Amazon has published is $839 million net of cash. Our profile of Scrub Daddy makes the same point about another famous figure: check what each number actually measures before you repeat it.
