George Köffler, Karsten Mashmeyer, Judith Williams, Nils Glagau, Dagmar Vohrl, Frank Thelen and Ralph Dummel (left to right) are on the lookout for promising start-ups.
(Photo: Bernd-Michael Maur, TVNOW)
Düsseldorf Carsten Maschmeyer and Dagmar Wöhrl were thrilled. Investors in the start-up show “Die Hohle der Löwen” put 100,000 euros in start-up cake gossip in 2018 and received ten percent of the shares in return. Planned growth figures promised a good deal.
But four years later, Cake Gossip filed for bankruptcy. The expansion of the 650-square-metre Adventure Bakery created a financing gap that even a crowdfunding investment campaign was unable to close. ,The overall tense situation in the economy hurt us too, and the campaign wasn’t as successful as it should have been,” said founder Katharina Meyer on LinkedIn.
Cake Gossip isn’t the first company to be offered a deal by investors on the TV show “Lions Den” and then filed for bankruptcy.
It turns out that being selected on a start-up show doesn’t carry a seal of approval – quite the contrary. According to the calculations of CreditSafe Credit Rating Agency, the risk of insolvency is much higher than that of the economy in general.
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