YouTube creator James Stephen Donaldson, known as MrBeast, made his debut on Shark Tank on September 30, 2026, investing $250,000 for a 55 percent stake in Sperry Labs alongside Beast Industries CEO Jeff Housenbold to back an AI-powered toy ball called Ball 2.
Television investors and digital creators collided on the season premiere of a high-stakes business show when the internet personality entered the tank. The pitch came from first cousins Andrew Brown and Kevin Langdon from rural Pennsylvania, who designed a foam orb equipped with sensors and artificial intelligence to measure throws, spins, and bounces. While veteran investors questioned whether shoppers would embrace a smart toy that looks identical to standard athletic equipment on a retail shelf, the digital creator bet heavily on his own capacity to manufacture viral attention.
Sperry Labs Pitches Ball 2 and AI-Generated Games
The product at the center of the deal is not a standard toy. Founded by Brown, a game designer who previously worked at Electronic Arts, Ball 2 contains internal sensors and AI that communicate with a companion mobile application. Players can tell the app what kind of game they want to play, and the artificial intelligence builds the rules within moments. During the television appearance, the founders demonstrated the technology by creating a live game called 10 Feet of Death
inside the studio.
MrBeast and Beast Industries CEO Jeff Housenbold invested $250,000 for a 55% stake in an AI-powered toy ball company on Shark TankBall 2 lets players describe a game to its app before AI creates the rules for them pic.twitter.com/5hquymgUut
The device operates without requiring a charging cable, and its battery is not rechargeable or designed to be replaced. Before stepping into the tank, the five-person team had funded the company entirely themselves without outside investment, selling approximately 1,300 units and generating about $74,000 in sales over less than six months.
Negotiation Terms and Valuation Differences
When Brown and Langdon first addressed the panel, they asked for $200,000 in exchange for a 10 percent equity stake in their company. Veteran sharks expressed hesitation about the product’s marketability and its retail price point. The toy costs about $13.29 to manufacture and carries a retail price of $69, a figure that Donaldson himself questioned openly during the broadcast.
If you put this next to another ball on a shelf it’s a tough sell.
Kevin Langdon, co-founder of Sperry Labs
The negotiation quickly pivoted when Team Beast entered the bidding. Donaldson and Beast Industries CEO Jeff Housenbold opened with an aggressive counteroffer of $300,000 in exchange for a 66 percent stake, leveraging the reach of existing product lines in stores such as Walmart, Target, and Amazon. After pushback from the cousins, both sides compromised on a final agreement of $250,000 for a 55 percent stake in Sperry Labs.
Demonstrations and Viral Marketing Strategy
To test the mechanics of the smart toy on camera, Donaldson and fellow guest investor Lori Greiner participated in a live shake-off competition to see who could activate the internal sensors more vigorously. Donaldson won the impromptu contest and shared his assessment of the hardware on air.
It worked way better than I was expecting it to work.
James Stephen Donaldson, YouTube creator
While other investors worried that consumers would balk at paying $69 for a ball, Donaldson found personal nostalgia in the product, noting it reminded him of his own childhood imagination. Housenbold emphasized that the core strategy relies on the creator’s digital reach, arguing that a single promotional video can place the product in front of more potential buyers than the startup reached during its entire previous existence.