Two Black Entrepreneurs Receive $300K ‘Shark Tank’ Investment, One Wants To Encourage Trenton Community

A Black entrepreneur who received a $300k investment on "Shark Tank" wants to use his success to encourage aspiring entrepreneurs coming out of his hometown in Trenton, New Jersey

Two Black male entrepreneurs who launched a company aimed at combatting bots overtaking the consumer market received a $300,000 Shark Tank investment and now one wants to use his success to encourage aspiring entrepreneurs coming out of his hometown in Trenton, NJ.

Joel Griffith and Maurice Bachelor are golf buddies who live in Los Angeles and found it difficult to book tee times during the pandemic. Once they figured out that companies were creating Bots to buy up all the tee times and resell them online for higher prices, Griffith and Bachelor decided to “fight back” by launching their own company called “Bot-It.”

Bot-It is a website and smartphone app that uses AI to automate various online tasks, much like the Bots people see dominating the online ticket-buying space.

“If you need anything automated—booking time, dinner reservations, concerts, you set up a bot and the system will do it for you,” Griffith tells the Trenton Journal. “You don’t have to be on the computer at the exact time.”

In October 2023, Griffith and Bachelor appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank where they received a $300,000 offer from Mark Cuban and Michael Rubin.

“I felt great,” Griffith said. “We were extremely happy. It’s really hard to get on the show. Once you’re there, the sharks can be sharks. We were lucky to be so prepared. We had all their questions answered in a timely manner.”

Now with his newfound entrepreneurial success, Griffith is hoping to inspire his hometown of Trenton, NJ to do the same.

“The biggest pleasure I got out of being on the show was showing people from my hometown [that] you can become something more. Go to school. Continue to grind. You can do anything,” he said.

“I have a two-year-old daughter. I want her to look back and see her father built something he’s proud of; help inspire her to build things too.”

The Morehouse grad, who worked as an account executive for LinkedIn, Snap Inc., Amazon, and TikTok before co-founding Bot-It, knows Trenton is known for all of the successful athletes the city has birthed. However, Griffith believes his hometown is well on its way to an entrepreneurial breakthrough.

“I think Trenton is prime for a comeback. There’s renewed interest in the city with the mayor being in leadership. Entrepreneurs and small businesses look at Trenton as a place to grow,” he said.

“A new housing development is being built. Trenton has so much potential. It’s the capital of the state. By the end of the decade, we’ll see Trenton much different than it was over the past 20 years.”

Bachelor is a Cleveland native who is also making his community proud with his Shark Tank success. He spoke with Cleveland News 5 last year about Bot-It serving as a solution to securing event tickets online.