xCraft got the rarest result Shark Tank offers: a deal with all five Sharks. In an episode that ABC aired on October 23, 2015, JD Claridge and Charles Manning asked for $500,000 for 20% of their drone company and, according to SlashGear and Business Insider as relayed by Looper, left with $300,000 from each Shark for 5% each, $1.5 million for 25% in total. Fortune reported the valuation climbed to $6 million in about twelve minutes. Whether that money ever arrived is a question the public record does not settle. What it does show is where the company went afterward: its consumer product, the PhoneDrone Ethos, was sunset in 2019 with refunds promised to backers, and xCraft today sells drones to commercial and government customers.

What was pitched, and did xCraft get a deal on Shark Tank?

Yes, on air. Fortune’s account of the episode (Season 7, Episode 5) says Claridge opened with the $1,800 X PlusOne, a hybrid drone, then moved to the PhoneDrone, a four-propeller shell that turns a smartphone into a self-navigating drone using the phone’s own gyroscope, accelerometer, GPS and camera, with a projected retail price near $300. Manning, a software veteran, assembled a syndicate of Sharks on the spot, per Fortune, and all five came in. Claridge told Fortune: “I’m just amazed. We got more money than what we asked for—three times as much—and we got all five sharks on board.”

The terms, per SlashGear: an ask of $500,000 for 20% ($2.5 million valuation), Kevin O’Leary opening at $750,000 for 25%, Daymond John and Lori Greiner each offering $1 million, the founders pushing for $10 million and the table settling at $6 million. The arithmetic checks out: $300,000 for 5% implies $6 million, which our post-money valuation calculator confirms. Fortune, DroneLife and Emerging Prairie all report the all-five-Sharks outcome; Fortune does not give the dollar terms, so the per-Shark figures rest on SlashGear and Looper.

Did the deal close?

Sources disagree, and none we found is conclusive. SlashGear (2025) says the deal “never actually closed” but hedges that it is unclear where things fell apart. Looper cites an SEO site that says xCraft did not end up partnering with any Shark. DroneLife, writing in March 2016, simply describes the company as having received a “$1.5 million investment.”

The one primary document we opened does not mention the Sharks at all. xCraft’s SEC offering circular, dated July 27, 2020, says the company had raised over $2 million through securities offerings, including Regulation CF crowdfunding rounds and a Regulation D offering. It does not mention Shark Tank, and its named directors are Claridge, aircraft designer Elbert L. Rutan and Ben Toews of Bullet Tools, none of them on the show’s panel. That is absence of evidence rather than proof either way, and we do not claim the deal failed. We also found no figure for the valuation that the company’s later raises used that we could reconcile across sources, so we leave valuations out.

The Kickstarter bump and the backlog

The episode landed on top of two crowdfunding campaigns. DroneLife reported that the X PlusOne had raised $143,400 from 263 backers, and that PhoneDrone Ethos had almost $170,000 pledged with 34 days left, as of its October 27, 2015 piece. Demand then outran production: in March 2016 DroneLife quoted Claridge as saying the wait for an X PlusOne was about 90 days because assembling the drones in-house was slow, with an outside manufacturer expected within about two months.

2019: the phone drone is sunset

The consumer product did not make it. On February 20, 2019, xCraft’s backer update, posted on the product’s BackerKit page, said: “The time has come to sunset PhoneDrone Ethos.” It added that “xCraft will be refunding ALL PhoneDrone Ethos backers and customers,” and that “xCraft is pursuing legal action but we are not going to drag our backers and customers through this lengthy process.” The update does not name who the legal action targets. A refund portal was announced as “finally ready” on April 4, 2019, but on May 8, 2019 the company wrote that it had “not yet been able” to provide refunds. We could not find a later update confirming completion, so we do not say whether backers were made whole.

A smaller company, built for businesses

By 2020 the company was a different animal. The SEC circular describes an Idaho LLC formed on September 23, 2014 and converted to a Delaware corporation in February 2017, based in Coeur d’Alene. (The Spokane Journal says it was founded in Sandpoint in 2013 and moved to Coeur d’Alene in 2016; we use the filing for the legal dates.) It sold mainly to businesses and government, with products including Shadow, a tethered drone, the X2Q hybrid VTOL and the Maverick tactical drone. Revenue was $680,677 in 2019 against $1,051,970 in 2018, with an operating loss of $747,290 in 2019. The company attributed the decline to the loss of a significant customer, unnamed. It had three full-time and three part-time employees, and about $33,000 in cash at year-end 2019.

The Spokane Journal reported on April 9, 2020 that a StartEngine campaign had raised $1.1 million from more than 2,300 investors, an average of $425. Claridge told the paper: “We have been pulling out cash as (the campaign) went along to maintain operations and keep things rolling.” Claridge’s own origin story, told to Emerging Prairie around 2016, runs back to a childhood hang glider and an aerospace degree at LeTourneau University; “It’s something I can’t shut off,” he said. “It’s part of me. Flying objects. Developing new ideas.”

Where xCraft is now

As of November 2026, xCraft’s website lists commercial drones, among them the Panadrone, Matrix, Maverick, Nano and Shadow lines, aimed at public safety, surveying and mapping, defense, and mining and construction, and it carries an investor call to action. The 2020 filing lists no military customer, so we cannot confirm defense sales from our sources. We have no financials more recent than 2019 that we can verify.

What founders can take from it