Product Update

Is First Light Solutions Still in Business? (2026 Update)

Is First Light Solutions from Dragons’ Den still around in 2026? The deal it made, the dragons who invested, and where to buy First Light Solutions today.

Dragons' Den IndexUpdated 10 July 20266 min read

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First Light Solutions pitched a sonar-based man-overboard detection system, a genuinely ambitious piece of maritime safety technology, at a time when the Den was still finding its feet in its early series. The straightforward answer here is no, the company is not still in business. It stopped trading years ago.

The Short Answer

First Light Solutions dissolved from the Companies House register in 2012, several years after its pitch aired. It has been named in industry retrospectives as one of the more notable Dragons' Den failures, a company whose ambition on the day did not translate into a lasting business.

This is one of the cases on our list where the evidence clearly points away from the fact that the company is still active, and we think it is more useful to say so plainly than to hedge.

The Pitch

Founder Matthew Hazell brought First Light Solutions to the Den in Series 3, Episode 3, in one of the show's earliest years. The pitch centred on a sonar-based system designed to detect when someone had gone overboard from a boat and alert the crew, a serious maritime safety problem with a genuinely small existing market of specialist solutions.

Hazell reportedly told the Dragons the company could be worth £63 million, a valuation that raised eyebrows on the panel even before any numbers were discussed in detail. Big claims like that tend to put Dragons on the back foot, forcing them to either challenge the founder hard or walk away entirely.

The Deal

Richard Farleigh, then one of the show's Dragons during Series 3 and 4, agreed to invest £100,000 in exchange for a 30 percent stake in the company. Farleigh built his fortune through currency and derivatives trading, and he was known on the panel for backing technical, hard-to-evaluate products that other Dragons tended to avoid.

Even with a Dragon willing to back an ambitious maritime technology idea, a first-of-its-kind safety product like this one faced a genuinely difficult road: expensive testing, a small and specialised customer base, and the kind of regulatory and reliability bar that safety-critical equipment has to clear before anyone will put it on a boat.

The £63 million valuation claim on pitch day is worth dwelling on for a moment, because it says something about why this deal was always a higher-risk bet than most. A founder confidently naming a huge future value for an unproven safety technology, still years from mass adoption, is making a bet on a market that does not yet fully exist. Farleigh's willingness to back that bet anyway reflected his general appetite for technical, contrarian ideas, but it also meant the downside case, a company that never finds its market, was always a real possibility from day one.

What Went Wrong

The company's own struggles appear to have caught up with it within a few years of the pitch. Reports covering the biggest Dragons' Den failures list First Light Solutions among companies where the idea was ahead of its time but the business itself never found a sustainable path to market, describing the venture as having been forced to abandon ship by 2012.

Sonar-based safety technology for a niche maritime market is a genuinely hard commercial proposition. The development costs are high, sales cycles with boat operators and maritime safety bodies are slow, and a small company without deep pockets can run out of runway well before the product reaches the scale needed to be profitable.

It is also worth noting that this pitch happened in Series 3, one of the show's earliest years, when both the format itself and the general public's expectations around what a televised investment actually guaranteed were still being worked out. Several early-series deals from that period did not survive long term, and First Light Solutions is one of the clearer examples cited in retrospectives looking back at the show's less successful outcomes.

Where Things Stand Now

First Light Solutions pitched in Series 3 for £100,000 at 30 percent, and closed that amount with Richard Farleigh.

The company dissolved from the Companies House register in 2012 and is not trading today. Founder Matthew Hazell appears to have moved on to other ventures, reportedly including work in solar projects, but the man-overboard detection business itself did not survive. If you are researching this one for investment or purchasing reasons, treat it as a closed chapter rather than an ongoing company.

Where to buy First Light Solutions

Still selling as of 10 July 2026. Check today's price and availability.

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See the full First Light Solutions deal breakdown and term sheet →