Season Recap

Dragons’ Den Season 18 Recap: Every Deal Worth Knowing

Season 18 by the numbers: 70 pitches, 35 deals, the biggest checks, and the products that are still selling.

Dragons' Den IndexUpdated 12 November 20256 min read

Series 18 of Dragons' Den, first broadcast in 2021, put 70 pitches in front of the panel. 35 of them walked out with a deal, a strike rate of 50 percent, and the Dragons collectively put about £1.5M behind the businesses they backed.

Series 18 aired in 2021, during the period when Dragons' Den filming was affected by COVID-19 restrictions, with the entrepreneurs and Dragons keeping a two-metre distance and skipping the traditional handshake on a deal. Despite the changed studio conditions, the deal rate jumped to an even 50 percent, its highest point in this run so far.

Across the 22 series in our index, series 18's total investment of £1.5M ranks 2nd highest, and its 35 deals rank 1st 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 18 sits where it sits on both counts.

How many pitches got a deal in series 18?

Of the 70 pitches that appeared in series 18, 35 secured investment, for a deal rate of 50 percent. That climbed sharply compared with the 38 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 50 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 18

The biggest single deal of series 18 went to Positive Birth, which secured £136,000 in exchange for 10 percent equity. The investment came from Touker Suleyman and Tej Lalvani.

A 10 percent stake for £136,000 values Positive Birth at roughly £1,360,000 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: £136,000 of the £1.5M the Dragons put into series 18 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 18

The categories that did best with the Dragons in series 18 were Other, Green & CleanTech and Fashion & Beauty. '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.

Green & CleanTech taking a top spot in series 18 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 18 businesses are still trading?

Based on our tracking, Icebloc, Masterpeace, Nursem and Offblak 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.