UPDATE: Trisha Prabhu accepted a joint $100,000 offer from Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner, in exchange for a 20 percent stake in her company. Updated story below.
Naperville teen entrepreneur Trisha Prabhu's anti-bullying tech ReThink asks students to reconsider the messages they send on social media. It's an innovative idea that's captured a lot of attention: she's exhibited at the Google Science Fair and White House Science Fair, and been awarded the MIT Aristotle Award and International Diana Award, among other honors, for her work.
She can now add Shark Tank funding to that list of accomplishments.
Prabhu pitched ReThink on the season premiere of Shark Tank Friday, and secured a joint investment from Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner in exchange for 20 percent of her company.
ReThink is an app that uses patent-pending, sophisticated context sensitive algorithms to sense when a hurtful message is about to be sent, and send an alert asking students to pause and think before sending. Essentially, it's a smart keyboard that knows when kids are about to say something mean, and asks them to stop before they do something harmful. In a study, Prabhu found over 93 percent of the time adolescents change their minds and decide not to post a hurtful message when using ReThink.
The tech has steadily gained traction since Prabhu first launched the app in 2014: the app been downloaded thousands of times on Google Play and the App store, it's used in over 1,000 schools worldwide, and has been introduced to over 1.3 million students in Michigan as a part of their OK2SAY cyberbullying awareness program.
Prabhu said a Shark Tank appearance can help her grow even further.
"When my company, ReThink, reached the point where we needed the capital and guidance of the Sharks to take our movement to the next level, I decided Shark Tank could be an amazing opportunity to make that happen and change lives," she said to Chicago Inno over email. "It was a humbling experience, and I was so proud to see how far we've come in our mission to stop cyberbullying forever."
