Trevor Hiltbrand walked into Shark Tank asking for $75,000 for 20% of Cerebral Success, valuing his brain-supplement company at $375,000. He left with something more expensive: $75,000 from Barbara Corcoran for 40% of the company. (sharktankblog.com)
The product was a nootropic supplement aimed primarily at college students and professionals who wanted more focus, memory and mental energy. Hiltbrand had developed it after his own experience balancing college, sleep and studying. The pitch was controversial because he openly acknowledged that, at the time, he did not have scientific evidence showing that the finished combination worked as claimed.
Corcoran invested anyway.
For a while, Cerebral Success appeared to be exactly the kind of Shark Tank company that had found its missing ingredient: distribution. The product was reformulated and rebranded as SmartX, reached GNC stores, and was being sold through Amazon and other retailers.
Then the trail largely goes cold.
The popular version of the story says Cerebral Success shut down in 2019. Some sites go further and claim Hiltbrand sold the business that year. But those claims are much harder to substantiate than the earlier milestones. The available primary and institutional records establish that the business was real, that Corcoran invested, that SmartX reached retail distribution, and that Hiltbrand eventually moved on to other companies. They do not provide a clean, primary-source announcement saying exactly when Cerebral Success ceased operations or what happened to Corcoran's stake.
That distinction matters.
Hiltbrand got the Shark Tank deal, but at twice the equity he wanted
Cerebral Success appeared in Season 5, Episode 26, which aired on April 25, 2014. Hiltbrand's ask was $75,000 for 20%. (imdb.com)
The Sharks had obvious concerns. Hiltbrand was selling a supplement positioned around cognitive performance, but he could not point to a clinical study proving that the complete formula produced the promised effects. The episode's synopsis records that the individual ingredients had research behind them, but the combined product did not have equivalent evidence. (m.imdb.com)
Barbara Corcoran was the exception.
She offered the full $75,000, but wanted 40% rather than the 20% Hiltbrand had offered. Hiltbrand attempted to negotiate to 37%, but Corcoran held at 40%. He accepted. The resulting deal valued the company at $187,500, less than half the valuation Hiltbrand had proposed when he entered the Tank. (sharktankblog.com)
There is also a useful independent confirmation from Brigham Young University. A 2026 BYU account of its alumni who appeared on Shark Tank lists Hiltbrand's outcome as $75,000 for 40% with Corcoran. (philanthropies.churchofjesuschrist.org)
The first post-Shark Tank move was to turn Cerebral Success into SmartX
The company did not simply keep selling the same product under the same presentation.
In October 2014, Cerebral Success announced that SmartX would enter GNC stores nationwide. The company said this was its first traditional retail-store distribution, after previously selling through CerebralSuccess.com and Amazon. (prweb.com)
The company also said Hiltbrand had made $60,000 in sales before appearing on Shark Tank, while online sales quadrupled on the night the episode aired. Those are company-reported figures rather than audited financial results, so they should be treated accordingly. (prweb.com)
SmartX was also being repositioned around a more conventional brain-health formulation. In April 2015, Cerebral Success announced a version incorporating Cognizin citicoline alongside other ingredients, and said the product was available through GNC, Amazon and other supplement retailers. (cognizin.com)
This is the point where many retrospective articles turn the story into a straightforward success narrative: Barbara invested, used her connections, SmartX reached more than 1,000 stores, and the company supposedly became a major winner.
The contemporary record is more interesting.
SmartX also ran into questions about whether its claims were supported
Cerebral Success had already attracted scrutiny before its Shark Tank appearance.
In September 2014, the National Advertising Division reviewed SmartX advertising after a challenge from the Council for Responsible Nutrition. NAD found that the evidence supplied by Cerebral Success did not substantiate several of the product's performance claims. In particular, the studies submitted involved individual ingredients rather than SmartX itself or a substantially similar combination of ingredients. (bbbprograms.org)
NAD recommended that Cerebral Success discontinue claims including that SmartX could enhance memory, focus and mental agility, as well as claims positioning Cerebral Success as an alternative to Adderall for students. (bbbprograms.org)
That does not mean the ingredients themselves had no scientific literature behind them. It means something more specific: evidence for individual ingredients was not automatically evidence that the finished SmartX formula delivered the advertised effects.
Cerebral Success subsequently promoted its own study. In October 2014, the company said preliminary results showed increases in processing speed, memory recall and alpha brain waves after seven days. (prweb.com)
Those figures were claims made by the company about its study, not evidence that SmartX had received FDA approval or that its broad cognitive claims had been independently established. The distinction is particularly relevant because the advertising dispute had already centered on the difference between ingredient-level evidence and evidence for the finished product.
By 2015, the business had real retail distribution
This part of the story is considerably better documented than the later claims about the company's demise.
A 2015 announcement from Cognizin's manufacturer described SmartX as a Shark Tank-backed product and confirmed distribution through GNC, Amazon and other retailers. (cognizin.com)
There is also evidence that Corcoran's involvement was more than a television handshake. Contemporary reporting specifically credited her mentorship with helping SmartX reach GNC. (prweb.com)
So the post-Shark Tank period was not imaginary. Cerebral Success did not simply appear on television, collect publicity and immediately vanish. It changed its branding, expanded distribution and got onto national retail shelves.
But the company did not build a long public record of growth from there.
Trevor Hiltbrand eventually left Cerebral Success for other businesses
One of the clearest clues about what happened next is Hiltbrand himself.
Business databases record his tenure as founder of Cerebral Success ending in October 2015. The same records show him moving into Transparent Labs, the supplement company he founded in 2015. (crunchbase.com)
Contemporary reporting from 2019 shows Hiltbrand serving as CEO of Transparent Labs, which had grown from roughly $4 million in annual revenue to more than $10 million within two years, according to figures cited by AdExchanger. (adexchanger.com)
That does not, by itself, prove that Cerebral Success had closed. It does establish something that many Shark Tank update articles blur: the founder moved on well before the later claims about Cerebral Success being definitively out of business.
Hiltbrand subsequently became involved with other ventures, including Project Solar. Current business-profile records identify him as Project Solar's co-founder and CEO. (crunchbase.com)
So, is Cerebral Success still in business?
The most defensible answer is no longer operating as the company it was on Shark Tank, but the exact shutdown timeline is unclear from reliable primary sources.
The original Cerebral Success website is no longer functioning as an active company storefront. Current business databases list the company as historical rather than an active operation, and Hiltbrand is no longer associated with it. (cbinsights.com)
But the oft-repeated claim that Hiltbrand definitively sold Cerebral Success in 2019 for an undisclosed amount is not supported by a primary-source sale announcement that I could verify. It appears repeatedly in Shark Tank-focused websites, but repetition is not independent confirmation. (sharktankwiki.com)
The same caution applies to claims that Cerebral Success generated a particular later-year revenue figure or remained "alive" under a new owner. Those numbers circulate online without the underlying financial records needed to treat them as established fact.
What is established is narrower and more useful.
Cerebral Success secured Barbara Corcoran's $75,000 investment in 2014. It became SmartX. It expanded into GNC and other retail channels. It faced a documented challenge to its advertising claims. And its founder had moved on to other businesses by the middle of the decade. (prweb.com)
The rest of the story has been filled in by Shark Tank update sites with varying degrees of confidence.
That makes Cerebral Success less a clean Shark Tank success story or failure story than an unusually instructive one: the deal happened, the retail expansion happened, and the product genuinely reached a much larger market. What happened after Hiltbrand moved on is simply not documented well enough to justify all the certainty found in later summaries.
And today, the clearest evidence is the absence of the business itself. The Cerebral Success brand that appeared before the Sharks is no longer an active consumer business with a functioning company presence. The entrepreneur behind it has long since moved on.
