Product Update
Is Chapul Still in Business? (2026 Update)
Is Chapul from Shark Tank still around in 2026? The deal it made, the sharks who invested, and where to buy Chapul today.
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Chapul walked onto Shark Tank selling cricket flour energy bars, one of the earlier attempts to bring insect protein into the American pantry. What is remarkable about this company is not that the protein bars survived, they did not, but that founder Pat Crowley pivoted the entire business into something bigger and kept raising serious money to build it.
The Short Answer
Sort of, and the story behind that answer is more interesting than a simple yes. Chapul got out of the protein bar business entirely after its co-packer went out of business in 2019, so you cannot buy a Chapul cricket bar today. But the company itself did not close. It pivoted into insect farming infrastructure and has since raised millions of dollars in outside funding to build that new business.
So if you are looking for the bars, the answer is no, they stopped making them years ago. If you are asking whether Chapul the company still exists, the answer is yes, just as a completely different kind of business.
The Shark Tank Pitch
Pat Crowley pitched Chapul in Season 5, Episode 21, out of Salt Lake City, Utah. He asked for 50,000 dollars in exchange for 5 percent of the company, presenting cricket flour protein bars, a specialty food product built around sustainable, insect-based protein.
It was a bold, ahead-of-its-time pitch for American consumers, and it needed a shark willing to bet on a category most shoppers had never considered.
The Deal That Got Done
Mark Cuban made the deal at the full 50,000 dollars asked for, but at 15 percent equity instead of the 5 percent on the table. Cuban's investment gave Chapul both capital and a public endorsement of a genuinely unusual product category.
The bars found some traction, reaching around 750,000 dollars in sales by Season 7 and roughly 2 million dollars in lifetime sales before the pivot away from them began.
From Protein Bars to Insect Farms
The turning point came in 2019, when Chapul's co-packer, the outside manufacturer producing the actual bars, went out of business. Rather than find a new co-packer and keep making the same product, Crowley used the disruption to pivot the company toward something more ambitious: building insect farming infrastructure using black soldier fly larvae, aimed at sustainable protein and waste-processing markets rather than direct-to-consumer snack bars.
That pivot pulled in real institutional money. In 2022, Chapul raised 2.5 million dollars to construct an Insect Innovation and Research Center in McMinnville, Oregon. By April 2023, the company had raised another 10 million dollars in a Series A funding round, with plans to eventually operate 20 facilities nationwide by 2032. Kind Bars founder Daniel Lubetzky invested an undisclosed amount in 2016 and continued backing the company through these later funding rounds, alongside Mark Cuban.
Chapul net worth in 2026
Chapul has raised a combined 12.5 million dollars or more in outside funding across its 2022 and 2023 rounds, which is a meaningful signal of investor confidence in the insect farming pivot, but funding raised is not the same thing as net worth or company valuation, and no sourced valuation figure has been publicly reported for Chapul as of this writing.
As of an April 2024 Shark Tank tracking update, the company is described as generating revenue, but reliable current numbers are unavailable. That is the honest state of the data. There is real capital behind this business, but no verifiable bottom-line figure to cite.
Where Things Stand Now
Chapul pitched Season 5 out of Salt Lake City as a cricket protein bar company, closed with Mark Cuban at 50,000 dollars for 15 percent, built the bars to roughly 2 million dollars in lifetime sales, then lost its manufacturing partner in 2019 and pivoted entirely into insect farming infrastructure.
Today the original snack bars are gone, but the company behind them has raised more than 12.5 million dollars to build black soldier fly farming facilities, with Daniel Lubetzky and Mark Cuban still involved as backers. It is not the business that pitched on Shark Tank anymore, but it is very much still alive.
Where to buy Chapul
Still selling as of February 1, 2026. Check today's price and availability.
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See the full Chapul deal breakdown and term sheet →
