Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTuber known as MrBeast, and Beast Industries CEO Jeff Housenbold invested $250,000 for a 55% stake in Sperry Labs, maker of the AI-powered toy Ball 2, during their debut as guest Sharks on the Season 18 premiere of ABC’s “Shark Tank.” The episode, titled “Beast Mode,” aired September 30.

Sperry Labs co-founders Andrew Brown and Kevin Langdon had asked for $200,000 for 10% of the company. Donaldson and Housenbold, pitching jointly as “Team Beast,” first offered $300,000 for 66%. The founders countered at 51%, and the two sides settled on $250,000 for 55%.

Ball 2 is a foam ball with embedded sensors and Bluetooth connectivity that pairs with a companion app running conversational AI. Players describe a game aloud, and the app generates rules in real time while the ball tracks throws, spins, and bounces. During the pitch, the founders built a game called “10 Feet of Death” live in the tank. Sperry Labs sells the AI-enabled version for $69 and a non-AI version for $49. The company reported $74,000 in sales from roughly 1,300 units since launching, against a per-unit production cost of $13.29, as reported by Dexerto.

“I could see myself back when I was 13, 14 years old, you know, talking to the AI,” Donaldson said during the pitch. “I actually see this being very fun.” He also raised the price point directly: “I do see a lot of people going, ‘Wow, $69 for a ball.'”

An Existing Toy Business

Housenbold tied the investment to distribution Beast Industries already controls through its MrBeast Lab toy line. “We already have a toy company,” he said. “We distribute in Walmart, in Target, on Amazon.” After the deal closed, he added: “I can’t wait to make TikToks with these things.”

Sperry Labs was founded in December 2018 by Kevin Langdon and Andrew Brown, with a five-person team later self-funding Ball 2’s development before pitching on the show, according to The Cinemaholic. Brown and Langdon both attended Messiah University and had previously worked together at Play Impossible and the golf-technology company oobgolf; Brown also spent time at Electronic Arts as a product manager. The remaining three team members divided the technical and design work: Jeremy Rittenhouse, a former Diamond Kinetics engineer, built the chargeless sensor platform; Hugh Tompkins handled industrial design; and Gord Parke, a physicist, built the engine that records the ball’s taps, rolls and bounces. 

Ball 2 shipped its first units in December 2025 and officially launched the following February at the New York Toy Fair. Langdon has said the companion app is updated weekly, with the team developing classroom applications and support for multi-ball games that has since launched.

A Guest Shark Pairing

ABC cast Donaldson and Housenbold as a two-person guest-Shark team for Season 18, alongside a roster that also includes Mindy Kaling, J.J. Watt, Steven Bartlett, and Erin and Sara Foster. The guests join the show’s permanent panel of Barbara Corcoran, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Daymond John, Daniel Lubetzky, Kevin O’Leary, Kendra Scott and Rashaun Williams, following Mark Cuban’s departure after Season 16; Cuban told The Hollywood Reporter he wanted “a couple of summers” with his teenage children before they leave home. This season’s heavier tilt toward content creators and podcasters echoes a casting approach ABC has also used on “Dancing With the Stars.”

“Shark Tank,” which premiered in 2009 and is produced by MGM Television in association with Sony Pictures Television, has a track record of deals that scaled well beyond the tank; a past pitch, Ring, later sold its camera business to Amazon for $1 billion. 

Housenbold previously worked at Shutterfly before serving as a managing partner at SoftBank’s Vision Fund, according to a Business Insider report, prior to joining Beast Industries, Donaldson’s holding company spanning his YouTube channel, Feastables, “Beast Games,” the Step fintech acquisition, and Beast Philanthropy. 

Donaldson topped Forbes’ Top Creators List for a fifth consecutive year this year, reporting $300 million in earnings, and became the first individual creator to reach 500 million YouTube subscribers; his channel added 117 million subscribers in 2025, the largest single-year gain in the platform’s history, according to the fan-run analytics account MrBeast Statistics.

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