Season Recap

Dragons’ Den Season 7 Recap: Every Deal Worth Knowing

Season 7 by the numbers: 72 pitches, 15 deals, the biggest checks, and the products that are still selling.

Dragons' Den IndexUpdated 8 August 20256 min read

Series 7 aired in 2009 and held the line on series 6's strong close rate. Our index logs 72 pitches, of which 15 secured a deal, keeping the strike rate at 21 percent, matching series 6 exactly.

The total money on the table dropped sharply, though, which makes series 7 an interesting case study in volume versus scale. Here is the breakdown of a series that funded more founders while writing noticeably smaller cheques.

The Numbers

The Dragons committed a combined £400,000 across series 7's 15 deals, well down from series 6's £985,000 despite series 7 producing one more successful deal. That means series 7's average cheque size shrank considerably, even as the proportion of pitches that got funded held perfectly steady with the series before.

£400,000 across 15 deals averages out to roughly £27,000 per business, by far the lowest average of any series covered in this recap run so far. Whatever drove the drop, whether it was the wider economic climate of 2009 in the wake of the financial crisis, or simply a series of founders asking for and receiving smaller amounts, series 7 stands apart from its neighbouring series on this measure.

The Biggest Deal

Motor Mouse, a wireless computer mouse business shaped around famous sports cars, took the series' largest deal at £120,000 for 40 percent of the company from James Caan. It is the smallest headline deal of any series covered in this recap run so far, reinforcing that series 7 was a series of smaller, more distributed cheques rather than one or two dominant investments.

James Caan's involvement is notable too. He was a relatively recent addition to the panel by this point, and the Motor Mouse deal stands as one of the more prominent investments from his run on the show before he later departed the panel.

What the Dragons Were Backing

Other topped the rankings again, but Green & CleanTech broke into the top three for the first time in this recap run, alongside Kids & Education. Sustainability and environmental pitches were still a relatively novel category on the show at this point, and series 7 marks an early signal of the Dragons' growing appetite for them, a trend that would keep building over the show's next decade as green technology pitches became a regular fixture.

Sports & Outdoors and Tech & Software, both fixtures in the top three across several earlier series, dropped out entirely in series 7, replaced by this newer environmental focus, another sign of the show's category interests continuing to evolve series by series rather than settling into a fixed pattern.

Who's Still Trading

Apocalypse, Kemp Controller, True Call Ltd and U Star Novels are all tracked as still selling in our index. That is a strong survival showing for a series where the average deal size was notably smaller than the series immediately before and after it, suggesting smaller cheques did not necessarily mean weaker businesses.

Four out of 15 deals still trading gives series 7 a survival rate in the same range as series 5 and series 6, further evidence that the size of the initial investment is not, on its own, a strong predictor of which businesses go on to last.

Series 7 in Context

Series 7 shows that a high close rate and a lower total investment can happen in the same series. A 21 percent strike rate matching series 6 exactly, paired with less than half the total money changing hands, points to a series defined by a larger number of smaller, more evenly spread deals rather than a handful of headline-grabbing cheques.

It is a useful reminder that close rate and investment total are two separate measures of a series' strength, and a series can score highly on one while dropping sharply on the other.

Series 7 aired against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis working its way through the UK economy, and the timing lines up with a series that clearly ran on tighter money than the ones immediately either side of it.