Season Recap

Dragons’ Den Season 14 Recap: Every Deal Worth Knowing

Season 14 by the numbers: 70 pitches, 21 deals, the biggest checks, and the products that are still selling.

Dragons' Den IndexUpdated 11 May 20266 min read

Series 14 of Dragons' Den, first broadcast 2016 to 2017, put 70 pitches in front of the panel. 21 of them walked out with a deal, a strike rate of 30 percent, and the Dragons collectively put about £733K behind the businesses they backed.

Series 14 aired between 2016 and 2017 and is the first series in this run where the deal rate fell rather than rose, a reminder that the Den's generosity moves in both directions.

Across the 22 series in our index, series 14's total investment of £733K ranks 11th highest, and its 21 deals rank 11th 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 14 sits where it sits on both counts.

How many pitches got a deal in series 14?

Of the 70 pitches that appeared in series 14, 21 secured investment, for a deal rate of 30 percent. That dropped compared with the 35 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 30 percent figure alongside the raw count. 70 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 14

The biggest single deal of series 14 went to Love Me Beauty, which secured £80,000 in exchange for 8 percent equity. The investment came from Nick Jenkins and Sarah Willingham.

A 8 percent stake for £80,000 values Love Me Beauty at roughly £1,000,000 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: £80,000 of the £733K the Dragons put into series 14 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 14

The categories that did best with the Dragons in series 14 were Other, Fashion & Beauty 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.

Fashion & Beauty taking a top spot in series 14 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 14 businesses are still trading?

Based on our tracking, Big Boy Beanbag, Boot Buddy, Craft Clubs Ltd and Writesize 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.