ABC

The 14th episode of the 15th season of “Shark Tank” premiered on ABC on February 16, 2024, to an audience of 3.2 million people according to Nielsen Media Research’s viewership ratings. The third of four pitches heard in the episode was for Flora, a sophisticated houseplant monitoring device. The $49 MSRP gadget can instantly deliver details about a plant’s moisture levels, temperature, and need for sunlight, and though some of the Sharks expressed concerns that plant lovers would need to buy multiple sensors, the founder assured them that one pod is intended to be moved around to check all of your houseplants. Most of the Sharks didn’t feel that the product was a great fit for them, but one made an offer, which was countered with a deal that included a royalty component and advisory shares, and the segment closed with them shaking on said deal.

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We don’t know yet if the official deal closed after the post-filming due diligence period, although Flora’s founder boasted that his product definitely got hit by the “‘Shark Tank’ effect,” with sales increasing 500% month over month after the episode aired. However, beyond the immediate aftermath of the episode, details start to get a bit murky. That’s because, though the Flora mobile app is still being updated, the Flora website — its primary sales channel — and its social media accounts have been broken and/or dormant for months as of this writing. Let’s try to track Flora’s journey in a bit more detail.

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Aabesh De entered the tank seeking $300,000 for a 10% stake in the Flora Pod, his plant sensor and app company intended to make caring for houseplants easier. The sensor dials into key details as it relates to moisture, temperature, lighting conditions, and other vital signs, while the app can be used without the sensor to get plant care tips, set watering reminders, etc. The first detailed reading using the sensor shows up within seconds, making it easy and satisfying to use.

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When the episode was shot, the sensor cost $28 to make while selling for $49, but the next batch in greater volume would get the cost down to $14. When Kevin O’Leary and Barbara Corcoran expressed concerns that you’d need one pod for each plant, De explained that it’s intended to be moved and used with all of your plants. In the first year of sales, Flora grossed $192,000 in sales, $144,000 of which was from app subscriptions ($10 per month or $60 per year) and the remainder being from pod sales.

Robert Herjavec and Mark Cuban both felt they just weren’t the right fits for the product, so they opted out. Barbara was skeptical about the subscription model, so she followed them, as did Kevin O’Leary. Lori Greiner, though, offered $300,000 for 30%, to which De countered with 15% plus 5% advisory shares and a $2 royalty until she made back her investment, which she accepted.

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Exactly whether or not Aabesh and Lori’s deal closed during the formal due dilligence process after the episode was shot is, at least on the surface, difficult to discern. (Remember: What we see on TV is a preliminary, non-binding negotation that has no bearing on if an actual deal was closed or not.) Lori’s website has a list of “Shark Tank” investments, but it doesn’t look like it’s been updated in quite a while. As for her searchable social media accounts, her X, formally Twitter account has been dormant since the episode aired and her Facebook page has no relevant hits for a search for Flora. Aabesh, meanwhile, told Shark Tank Recap in February 2024 that the deal was still in the due diligence phase, but that was right after the episode aired, so that doesn’t help us much, but also gave the site some exclusive quotes.

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“As we were growing Flora, it made a lot of sense to apply as we had an innovative hardware product in a niche vertical,” he said. “Sales have jumped more than 500% across the board compared to the last month. We’ve added more than 10,000 downloads due to the Shark Tank spike as well, as downloads have been consistently above the baseline thus far.”

Meanwhile, Aabesh spoke to Nashville Business Journal for an article published in April 2024, but the article dealt mainly with the development of the Flora Pod, not the post-“Shark Tank” period. And that’s it for now.

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The question of if Flora is still in business looks like a tricky one to answer, to the point that we’ve reached out to the company via their contact email address and text messages to Aabesh De’s listed phone number to try to clarify what’s up. The biggest red flag, as of this writing in March 2025, is that the Flora website at FloraSense.com doesn’t appear to be functioning properly. If you manage to get through to the website, the CSS data governing the site’s design sometimes appears to be broken to the point of making the website non-functional.

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But getting through to the site is much easier said than done because there are issues with the site’s security certificate that leads to a warning in Google Chrome. And if you decide to ignore the warning and click through? McAfee’s network-level security software that’s enabled by default for Verizon Fios customers blocks the site. The last working cache of the site on The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is from December 14, 2024.

However, complicating matters is that the Flora mobile apps have been kept up to date. The iOS app was last updated with bug fixes and app optimizations on March 17, 2025, while the Android app was updated a few weeks earlier on February 28. Meanwhile, searching Google Shopping shows that ShipMyPlants.com has a few dozen of the Flora pods in stock. Whatever’s up, hopefully Aabesh gets back to us to clarify it.

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Aabesh De’s LinkedIn page still lists him as working full time as Flora’s founder and CEO, but there isn’t much to glean from his page beyond that. He’s utilized the platform’s blogging features at times, but he hasn’t posted on it since late 2024.  He has an account on X, formally Twitter, but it’s been dormant since September 2022. The Flora LinkedIn page, meanwhile, has no blog posts or other time sensitive information that would give us a better idea of what’s up.

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Flora’s consumer-facing social media accounts aren’t exactly reassuring, either. Flora’s X account has been completely dormant since June 2022, and while the accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are more up to date, they’re not exactly promising leads, either. That’s because all three went dormant in the last few months of 2024, with the Instagram page (last post from December 30, 2024) being the most up-to-date. That’s also around when the Wayback Machine’s caches of the Flora website cut off, which raises the question of if some kind of significant issue befell the company around December 2024, one that would lead to the company neglecting its primary sales channel and its social media pages.

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All told, there’s a lot that we don’t know. The app updates are encouraging, but everything else we’ve learned calls the status of Flora into question. Hopefully, we’ll hear back from Aabesh De and he provides some definitive answers.