Intelli-Stopper is a wine bottle stopper with a red visual indicator that shows if there is air inside the bottle. It’s a solution that other wine preservers don’t deliver. “You never know if you pumped out the right amount of air and you never know if air gets back in the bottle,” says Intelli-Stopper co-founder Chase Hoyt.
[Hoyt & Co’s vacuum pump with Intelli-Stopper]
Hoyt and his co-founder father, Bob Hoyt of Tucson, Arizona, pitched their business on Shark Tank in April 2014. They went into the Tank seeking an investment of $250,000 in exchange for 10 percent equity. That $2.5 million valuation didn’t sit well with the Sharks, particularly with wine connoisseur Kevin O’Leary who told the Hoyts, “There’s so much we could be doing together if you weren’t such greedy pigs.”
The Hoyts invested $300,000 of their own money into the product but alas did not land a deal on Shark Tank. According to KGUN9 in Tucson, the Hoyts were “eaten alive” on the show, which was “their last resort”, however, in a post-Shark Tank show interview, Chase Hoyt said, “We’ve gotten an investor after” and they’re hoping to return to the Shark Tank.
Fun fact: Chase Hoyt is also an actor. He’s appeared on TV shows including The New Adventures of Old Christine, Privileged, Numb3rs, and Star Trek: Enterprise, among others. Hoyt was most recently in the 2016 film Poor Boy with Oscar nominee Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) and Justin Chatwin (Shameless). Check out his acting reel below. New episodes of Shark Tank air Sunday nights on ABC.