What Happened To The BenjiLock From Shark Tank Season 9?

The fourth episode of the ninth season of "Shark Tank" premiered on ABC on October 15, 2017. The fourth and final pitch featured that week was Benjilock, a padlock with a fingerprint reader. Despite only being at the prototype stage, CEO Robbie Cabral impressed the sharks with his slew of recently issued patents on his lock design, impressive charging time and battery life specs, and his overall ingenuity. Multiple sharks wanted in, and he made a deal with the investor who seemingly had the best understanding of the product and where it could go. That deal was quickly followed by an update segment a few months later, revealing that he had secured a major, life-changing partnership for Benjilock. 

However, more recently, the specifics of what's up with Benjilock have gotten murkier. The company website is out of date and no longer directs visitors to a functional storefront of where you can buy the locks. The existing stock of Benjilock products is almost completely depleted, too. However, it looks like what likely happened is that the initial partnership secured for Benjilock had expired, leaving room for a slate of new licensing deals that Benjilock secured in 2023. Between the company's press releases and its relatively active social media presence, it seems like it's still relatively healthy, albeit in a confusing way since its website suggests otherwise. So let's look in detail at what happened to Benjilock on "Shark Tank" and beyond. 

The segment isn't available on YouTube, but it is on Hulu in the U.S. If you don't have a way to watch, don't worry, we'll catch you up.

Robbie Cabral entered the tank seeking a $200,000 investment for a 10 percent equity stake in Benjilock, his fingerprint reader-equipped padlock company. The underlying concept is pretty self-explanatory, but the Benjilock also comes with a set of traditional keys in case the fingerprint reader somehow fails. At the time, it was at the prototype stage, but even then, Cabral had gotten his design fine-tuned to the point that a 30-minute charge would keep the lock's battery working for a year, and he had also just gotten various utility patents on the lock.  

Lori Greiner, meanwhile, was particularly impressed that Benjilock was a Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Innovation Award honoree, while Kevin O'Leary was intrigued by the prospects of licensing Benjilock to existing lock companies, including for household door locks. O'Leary offered $200,000 for 15 percent while pushing a focus on licensing, also arguing he had the power to make sure the licensee brought the product to market instead of burying it. Greiner matched O'Leary's deal, but felt he should make plays for both licensing and retail. Barbara Corcoran wanted to partner up with another shark at $200,000 for 20 percent, with guest shark Alex Rodriguez agreeing to join her in part because he related to Cabral as a fellow Dominican-American entrepreneur, while Mark Cuban opted out, feeling it wasn't a good fit. After the final commercial break of the episode, Cabral surprised the panel by choosing to accept O'Leary's offer of 15 percent.

A little over three months later, O'Leary brought Cabral on CNBC for an emotional interview segment in November 2017 (which also aired as a segment on "Shark Tank" itself) where Cabral was offered a $450,000 licensing deal from Hampton Products International, the parent company of Brinks. Hampton CEO Kim Kelley had seen the Benjilock episode of "Shark Tank" weeks earlier, and immediately reached out to O'Leary to arrange a deal. The interview closed with unusually up-to-date footage of Cabral and O'Leary days earlier at the Benjilock booth at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where they got a $1.5 million order from Ace Hardware.

"The intellectual property, the patents that you've got on this product, is really extensive," Kelley told Cabral during the CNBC segment. "We're looking forward to helping you leverage that."

"It is basically the American dream for me," Cabral responded. "Hopefully, now I can actually provide for my family and bring jobs too — that is the goal for me. I'm extremely happy."

As of this writing, determining the current status of Benjilock is more than a little bit tricky. At first glance, it seems like they're still thriving, with reasonably active social media and a presence at CES 2024. Peel back some layers, though, and it gets murkier. If you go to the Benjilock website, links to buy a given lock direct you to a "Benjilock by Hampton" page on Hampton's website... which no longer exists and just redirects to the front page of the Hampton website. Feeding that URL into The Wayback Machine on The Internet Archive yields no working caches from later than September 2022. That doesn't mean that's when it got taken down, but it still helps narrow down the timeline.

Looking elsewhere for Benjilock products doesn't help much. Walmart.com is sold out of the classic Benjilock, and the Benjilock brand page now redirects to search results that no longer include any Benjilock products. The bulk of the relevant, working hits on Google Shopping are for eBay listings, with the exception being a pair of SKUs (the classic Benjilock and a luggage lock) at Super Arbor, a California-based home improvement technology reseller with a reputation for carrying hard-to-find products. Going by appearances, it's possible Benjilock's license agreement with Hampton has expired, with only secondhand locks on eBay and "new old stock" at Super Arbor still available for the moment.

Searching the Gale General OneFile news database (formerly InfoTrac) for "Benjilock" and "Hampton" together yields results that end with a press release in August 2022, right before the end of the Wayback Machine caches for Hampton's Benjilock page. Benjilock and Hampton's licensing agreement ending around the fall of 2022 would fit with the two companies having a five-year contract, and sure enough, new licensing partnerships are frequently mentioned in subsequent Benjilock press releases. 

In 2023, Benjilock announced various new licensing partnerships, and this wider range of partnerships — as opposed to everything flowing through a single licensee like Hampton — is seemingly the strategy going forward. This started in April 2023, when Benjilock partnered with TKL Cases to develop musical instrument cases with keyless locks. Two months later, that was followed by a deal for a limited edition lock branded around Japanese "virtual artist" IA. Finally, in November 2023, Benjilock announced a deal with TechLok to develop hardware locks for laptop computers. Benjilock's website has not been updated to reflect this ostensible shift in strategy, but it looks like the company is still relatively healthy nonetheless.

As for Robbie Cabral, he's still the CEO of Benjilock according to his LinkedIn page. He doesn't have any other public-facing social media accounts, and his LinkedIn blog is mainly sharing Benjilock posts without much insight. His last interview of note, for Authority Magazine in September 2024, didn't add any insight as to where Benjilock stands.