Season Recap

Dragons’ Den Season 12 Recap: Every Deal Worth Knowing

Season 12 by the numbers: 65 pitches, 20 deals, the biggest checks, and the products that are still selling.

Dragons' Den IndexUpdated 19 July 20256 min read

Series 12 of Dragons' Den, first broadcast 2014 to 2015, put 65 pitches in front of the panel. 20 of them walked out with a deal, a strike rate of 31 percent, and the Dragons collectively put about £545K behind the businesses they backed.

Series 12, broadcast across 2014 and 2015, is where the Den's deal rate first pushed decisively past the 30 percent mark.

Across the 22 series in our index, series 12's total investment of £545K ranks 16th highest, and its 20 deals rank 12th highest by count. Those two rankings don't always move together, since a series can rack up a lot of small deals or a handful of large ones, and series 12 sits where it sits on both counts.

How many pitches got a deal in series 12?

Of the 65 pitches that appeared in series 12, 20 secured investment, for a deal rate of 31 percent. That climbed sharply compared with the 22 percent deal rate the series before it, which gives a sense of how choosy, or how generous, this particular panel of Dragons was being that year.

None of this means the other pitches were bad businesses. Dragons' Den has always turned down founders who go on to build successful companies without a Dragon's money, and it has funded some that later folded. The deal rate measures what happened in the room, not how the businesses performed afterwards.

It's also worth reading the 31 percent figure alongside the raw count. 65 pitches is a larger field than most series in this index, so the same deal rate can represent very different numbers of actual businesses funded depending on how many founders got through the door that year.

The biggest deal of series 12

The biggest single deal of series 12 went to Lostmy Name, which secured £100,000 in exchange for 5 percent equity. The investment came from Piers Linney.

A 5 percent stake for £100,000 values Lostmy Name at roughly £2,000,000 at the point of the deal, the kind of valuation math that plays out on screen every time a Dragon and a founder haggle over percentage points.

That single deal accounts for a meaningful share of the series' total investment: £100,000 of the £545K the Dragons put into series 12 overall went into just this one pitch, which is a useful reminder that a series total is rarely spread evenly across every deal made.

What the Dragons backed most in series 12

The categories that did best with the Dragons in series 12 were Other, Food & Drink and Kids & Education. 'Other' topping the list is normal for this show: Dragons' Den pitches cover everything from kitchen gadgets to fintech apps, and a large share of any series doesn't fit neatly into a single retail category.

Beyond that catch-all, the categories that stood out say something about what founders were bringing to the Den that year, and which of those ideas the panel judged worth backing.

Food & Drink taking a top spot in series 12 lines up with the kinds of products that tend to translate well to a live studio pitch: something the Dragons can hold, taste or try, rather than a service they have to take on faith.

Which series 12 businesses are still trading?

Based on our tracking, Frame Again, Replicablewarmachine, Scrubbys Vegetable Crisps and Skribbies are still trading in some form as of 2026.

Dragons' Den success is not measured only in who gets a deal on the night. Some of the strongest survivors from any given series turned down an offer, or never got one, and built the business anyway. Deal or no deal, survival past broadcast is the harder test.