Amber was a secure multiple-cellphone charging station designed for public places. The two founders of Amber, James Madison University graduates Kyle Byrd and Bill Shuey of Washington, D.C., pitched a prototype of Amber on Shark Tank in September 2014. They went into the Tank seeking an investment of $200,000 in exchange for 20 percent equity. They did not get a deal. As Byrd later described it, during the pitch, they “took some heavy blows (to put things lightly).” After the Shark Tank episode aired, they brought the unit price down from $1,000 to $75 and added a pay-per use model, and did secure funding, “but given the upfront costs in developing hardware,” Byrd said, it “was difficult to scale effectively.”
According to LinkedIn, Byrd left Amber in December 2014 and took a job as a user experience designer for a start-up in Reston, Virginia. Four years later and Byrd is now Senior Product Manager at the software company AgileCraft in Austin, Texas. New episodes of Shark Tank air Sundays at 9 pm on ABC. [Related: 27 Favorite ‘Shark Tank’ Products at Amazon — New List]
