The pitch
What walked into the Den
Quentin Crousle leads Cupko, a Montreal-based maker of reusable cups and bottles that has positioned itself as a reusable-cup pioneer in Canada.
The company pitched in Season 16, episode 4, which reached air in 2021, seeking $200,000 for a 20% stake. That set the implied value at $1,000,000.
After the show
What happened next
Cupko is still selling. On July 23, 2026 its storefront was live on Shopify with working cart and checkout for its reusable cups and bottles, and the brand appears to keep operating under the Cupko Canada name.
Our read
The Hub verdict
A $200,000 ask for 20 percent is a clean $1 million valuation, a sensible frame for a reusable-cup brand competing on sustainability rather than a patentable gadget. The Dragons did not argue the frame, they argued the arithmetic underneath it, one of them saying flatly that the maths failed and that he mistrusted the route to any profit. Margins are the whole game in reusables, where the product is cheap to copy and the price ceiling is low. Cupko kept trading anyway, with a live Shopify checkout years after the pitch.
No deal: the Dragons did not buy the margin story
