Product Update

Is Karuma Innovations Still in Business? (2026 Update)

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

Dragons' Den IndexUpdated 25 April 20266 min read

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Karuma Innovations pitched a child-friendly tablet retail business in Series 10, built around its PlayBase kids' tablet. The company technically still exists, but not in the form it pitched. If you are asking whether Karuma Innovations is still in business, the honest answer is yes and no: the company survives, the product does not.

The Short Answer

Karuma Innovations is still active as a company, but it is no longer selling the PlayBase tablets it pitched on Dragons' Den. The Singapore-based business has since shifted into consultancy work rather than continuing as a consumer electronics retailer.

So if you came here hoping to buy a PlayBase tablet in 2026, that specific product line is gone. The business entity behind it, in a different form, is not.

The Pitch

Karuma Innovations appeared in Series 10, Episode 9, pitching in the Kids & Education category. The product was PlayBase, a child-friendly tablet built with anti-microbial protection and durability aimed at parents worried about handing a regular tablet to a toddler.

The founders asked for £150,000 in exchange for 25 percent of the company, a substantial raise aimed at scaling up manufacturing and retail distribution for the tablet range.

The PlayBase pitch leaned heavily on durability and hygiene, positioning the tablet as an alternative to parents simply handing a toddler an adult device wrapped in a rubber bumper case. Anti-microbial coatings and a reinforced shell were framed as genuine safety features rather than marketing extras, aimed squarely at parents who wanted their child to have a device built for the way toddlers actually use electronics, which is to say, roughly and without much care.

What the Dragons Offered

An offer was made on the show, but the investment never actually went through afterward. As with many Den pitches, the specifics of why the deal fell apart during due diligence were not made public.

The failure to close outside investment is a common thread running through a lot of these Series 10 stories, and it often marks the point where a company either finds another way forward or quietly winds down its original product line.

What Happened After the Den

Karuma Innovations chose the former. Rather than closing entirely once the PlayBase line lost momentum, the company pivoted into consultancy work, drawing on the hardware and product development expertise it had built while creating the tablet.

That is a meaningfully different business to the one that pitched on the show. Consumer electronics retail and consultancy have very different economics, risk profiles and customer bases, so this is less a straightforward survival story and more a case of the company reinventing itself to keep operating at all.

Why Kids' Tablets Are a Hard Category

Child-friendly tablets are a genuinely tough consumer electronics category to compete in long term. Established giants like Amazon, with its Fire Kids range, and various supermarket own-brand alternatives can undercut a small independent hardware brand on price while matching it on durability features like rugged cases and parental controls.

Hardware businesses also carry heavier ongoing costs than most other Dragons' Den categories, from component sourcing and manufacturing to after-sales support and warranty claims, all of which get harder to sustain without a large injection of working capital. A pivot into consultancy, where the company can sell its expertise rather than compete on unit economics against much bigger manufacturers, is a fairly common and sensible move for a hardware start-up that could not scale the product side alone.

Where Things Stand Now

Karuma Innovations pitched in Series 10 asking for £150,000 for 25 percent to grow its PlayBase kids' tablet, and secured investor interest that ultimately did not convert into a completed deal.

The company is still on the books today, but as a consultancy rather than a tablet retailer. If you are measuring success by whether the exact product on the show is still for sale, the answer is no. If you are measuring it by whether the business itself kept the lights on, the answer is yes, just in a different shape.

If you are searching for a kid-friendly tablet to buy today, the PlayBase itself is not the product to look for. If you are researching Karuma Innovations as a business or the founders behind it, they appear to have found a second act rather than shutting down entirely, which puts this pitch in a genuinely unusual middle category between clear success and outright failure.

Where to buy Karuma Innovations

Still selling as of 25 April 2026. Check today's price and availability.

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See the full Karuma Innovations deal breakdown and term sheet →