What Happened To Linka Bluetooth Bike Locks From Shark Tank Season 7?

The 20th episode of the seventh season of ABC's "Shark Tank" premiered on February 26, 2016, to an audience of 5.45 million people, according to Nielsen Media Research's viewership ratings. The third of four pitches for the investors that week was Linka, a smart bicycle lock and alarm company. In short, what made Linka unique was that it locked the wheels to keep them from moving, auto-unlocked when it detected your phone approaching the bike, and had an alarm that sounded if someone tried to lift and carry the bike without disengaging the lock. The Sharks saw varying degrees of promise in the product, but all had enough problems with it, from the focus on not working like a traditional bike lock to the volume level of the alarm to the degree to which the space was crowded, that they elected to opt out without allowing CEO Mohamed Mohamed to make much of a case.

In the aftermath of the episode airing, it seems like Linka had some decent success, including augmenting its website sales with an Amazon presence and honors at cycling trade shows. Even as late as 2023, it was able to easily secure support for a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for a Linka version of a more traditional chain lock. However, since 2023, Linka's inventory has been depleted, and it looks like the company has either exited manufacturing for licensing or ceased functioning. Let's take a look at what happened to Linka on "Shark Tank" and beyond.

Entrepreneur Mohamed Mohamed entered the tank seeking a $250,000 investment for a 10 percent equity stake in Linka, his smart bike lock/alarm company. Claiming that one million Americans fall victim to bike theft annually and he'd gotten fed up with the problem, Mohamed decided to create Linka, "the world's smartest bike lock." As explained by Mohamed, Linka locks the bike's wheels so they won't move (rather than locking to a stationary object, as with a traditional bike lock) with the push of a button and automatically unlocks when it detects your phone approaching via Bluetooth Low Energy. The Linka app, meanwhile, tracked battery life, served updates on bike theft in your neighborhood, and recommended safer bike parking spots. Attempts to pick up the bike while the lock is engaged activates an alarm and also pings your phone.

Robert Herjavec seemed stumped as to why this was preferable to locking your bike to a solid, stationary object, but Mohamed explained that there was an option to work in a more traditional chain lock. It cost Mohamed $45 to make with the lock retailing for $129 ($159 with the chain). To date, Linka has sold $130,000 in Kickstarter pre-orders and another $40,000 since. Barbara Corcoran and Robert Herjavec both opted out, feeling Linka was not a clear deterrent for thieves. Kevin O'Leary followed over the $2.5 million valuation, and Lori Greiner over the alarm's low volume. Mark Cuban pulled out over how crowded the market was, and that was it for Linka.

The best accounting of what happened to Linka after it was featured on "Shark Tank" appears to come from the company's official blog. In the episode, Mohamed Mohamed stated his intent to attend trade shows in various cycling capitals around the world. A month after the segment aired, he was at the Taipei International Cycle Show. There, Linka says it won the show's Design and Innovation Gold Award, though there don't appear to be any other English language sources backing this up. At that point, the product had been shipping for about six months; three months after the show, Linka entered its second round of mass production. As 2017 went on, Linka continued to make upgrades to its device firmware and mobile app and also continued to hit up various cycling shows.

At Eurobike in August 2017, Linka won the show's Gold Award, with Linka publishing the Eurobike video awarding the company the honor on its own YouTube channel. "The award panel was greatly inspired," Linka quoted the Eurobike panel as saying. "LINKA has developed an intelligent lock with an exceptionally high quality finish and design." Weeks later, Linka was at Interbike in Las Vegas, which the company described as North America's largest cycling trade show. Days later, Linka received its long-awaited certification from ART, a Dutch foundation that gives its seal of approval to the best anti-theft locks, which carried a lot of weight with insurance companies in the Netherlands.

As of this writing in December 2024, it looks like there's a good chance that Linka has ceased being a functional business. Though Linka locks were sold on Amazon at one point, the item page is gone, and based on data on Amazon price history aggregator CamelCamelCamel, it looks like it's been out of stock for a long time. On the official LinkaLock.com website, every product is listed as either "Sold Out" or "Book a Demo." Pulling the site up on The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine suggests that this has been the status quo for at least a year.

Mohamed got the Linka Lasso chain lock successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2023, but it doesn't seem like Linka has done much of anything since then. Linka's conventional social media accounts have been dormant since mid to late 2023, as well, and the company's last press release was in June 2023. In the Kickstarter comments, there are a lot of complaints about poor communication, though Linka was insistent in July 2024 that all orders had shipped other than those with incomplete addresses. Linka's LinkedIn page remained active into 2024, and those posts imply without outright saying so that Linka may have pivoted from manufacturing into licensing its technology. As for Mohamed Mohamed, his LinkedIn says that he is still Linka's CEO. He has no personal social media presence, and his LinkedIn blog consists mainly of Linka post shares.