TWO entrepreneurs who were rejected on Dragons' Den had the last laugh as their business sold for £200million despite stars saying it had "no value".
Shane Lake and Tony Charles pitched their online takeaway ordering business Hungryhouse back in 2007.
The co-founders went in seeking a £100,000 investment in exchange for 11 percent equity in the business.
Peter Jones and Deborah Meaden quickly opted out of doing business with the duo.
One Dragon also told the entrepeneurs the public don't turn to a website when they want to order a takeaway.
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However, James Caan and Duncan Bannatyne saw its potential and collectively stumped up £100,000 in exchange for each getting a quarter of the business.
But four months after leaving the den, Caan backed out of the deal.
That setback didn't hurt Hungryhouse's fortunes, however.
Yahoo! News has since listed Hungryhouse as one of the “biggest missed opportunities” in the Den as it achieved great success.
The firm soon found £150,000 from different investors and, by 2016, it had 10,000 restaurants on its platform.
The online fast-food ordering service would quickly become a household name during the next decade, with the company logo plastered on takeaway windows up and down the country.
In just a few years, they were able to increase their restaurant partners from 150 in 2007 to over 2,500 in September 2010.
Just Eat later paid an eye-watering £200m to buy Hungryhouse, its biggest UK competitor, from the German group Delivery Hero in 2016.
In 2018, hungryhouse merged with its competitor JustEat and ceased trading under the hungryhouse moniker.
It has promised to hand over another £40m if the company hits performance targets.
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More than a decade later, Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats have changed the face of takeaways, with some Dragons' clearly getting this one wrong.
Another success story that came from the Den after rejection was Reggae Reggae sauce.
Stony faces greeted Levi Roots when he swaggered into the Dragons' Den singing about his beloved sauce that was “so nice he had to name it twice”.
It didn’t land well with some of the business giants, including Theo Paphitis, Deborah Meaden and investor Duncan Bannatyne was quick to claim his Jamaican jerk sauce business had “no future”.
But 16 years on, Levi, 64, is having the last laugh, having amassed a reported £30million fortune from supermarket, TV and book deals and now a film.
His incredible life story is getting the Hollywood treatment from Nick Moorcroft and Meg Leonard, the writers behind the feelgood flick Fisherman’s Friends about Cornish sea shanty singers.
