Product Update

Is Mark Mate Still in Business? (2026 Update)

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

Dragons' Den IndexUpdated 22 May 20266 min read

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Mark Mate walked into the Den promising to save teachers hours of marking every week, and years later the app is still doing exactly that. If you are here to check whether the company survived its Series 16 pitch, the short answer is yes, it is still going, and it has grown well beyond the classroom it started in.

The Short Answer

Mark Mate is still in business. The app is live, still sold directly to schools and teachers, and the company markets itself as a trusted marking tool with a track record stretching back to that Dragons' Den appearance. There is no Amazon listing here, because this was never a physical product. It is software, sold through its own website and direct to schools.

That is the right shape for this kind of business. Teachers do not buy marking software off a shelf, they sign up, trial it, and keep paying if it saves them time. Mark Mate has kept enough schools paying to still be trading years on.

The Pitch

Founder James Holmes brought Mark Mate into the Den in Series 16, Episode 7. He had been a primary school teacher himself, and built the app after living through the grind of marking books late into the evening, night after night.

The pitch was straightforward, an app that lets teachers dictate feedback out loud while they mark, instead of writing every comment by hand. The Dragons, most of whom have never marked a set of exercise books in their lives, still understood the pain point immediately. Teacher workload is one of those problems that sells itself once you say it out loud.

Holmes asked for £20,000 in exchange for 35 percent of the business, a generous slice for a relatively small ask, the kind of split that tells you a founder wants the money and the help more than they want to protect their cap table.

What Happened With the Deal

Mark Mate got a deal in the Den. Touker Suleyman was the Dragon who engaged most seriously with the pitch, offering to back Holmes with money and mentoring. As with a good number of Dragons' Den deals, the details that play out after the cameras stop rolling do not always match the handshake on screen.

Holmes has spoken since about receiving genuine mentoring and advice from Touker in the aftermath of filming, even as the company continued to grow under its own steam. Whether the investment itself completed in full or the relationship stayed mostly advisory, the practical result is the same one that matters here: Mark Mate kept building the product and kept it in schools.

Why It Is Still Standing

Education software is not an easy category. Schools move slowly, budgets are tight, and procurement can take a full academic year before a new tool is even trialled. Plenty of edtech startups burn through their runway waiting for that first big contract to land.

Mark Mate's advantage is that the core problem, teachers spending unpaid hours marking books at home, has not gone away. If anything, workload pressure on UK teachers has become a bigger story since the show aired, not a smaller one. A tool that promises to hand teachers back their evenings has a built in audience that renews itself every September.

Where Things Stand Now

Mark Mate pitched in Series 16, Episode 7, asking for £20,000 for 35 percent, and left with backing and mentoring from Touker Suleyman. Years on, the app is still marketed, still sold to schools, and the company still points back to its Dragons' Den appearance as part of its story.

There is no Amazon presence and no retail angle to check, because this was always a direct-to-school software sale. On that measure, the one that matters, whether the product is still out there being used, Mark Mate has held up. If you searched to find out whether it survived, it did.

Common Questions

Is Mark Mate still available to buy? Yes, schools and teachers can still sign up for the app directly through the company's own site, there is no retail or Amazon version to look for.

Did Touker Suleyman actually invest in Mark Mate? Touker engaged seriously with the pitch and provided mentoring and advice to founder James Holmes after filming. Whether the full £20,000 investment closed on the exact terms shown on air is less clear than the mentoring relationship itself, which Holmes has spoken about publicly.

What does Mark Mate actually do? It lets teachers record spoken feedback while marking, which the app turns into written comments, cutting down the time spent handwriting notes in every book.

Why did this pitch work in the Den? Teacher workload is a problem every Dragon could understand instantly, even without classroom experience, and a tool with a clear, provable time saving is an easy sell on camera.

Where to buy Mark Mate

Still selling as of 22 May 2026. Check today's price and availability.

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See the full Mark Mate deal breakdown and term sheet →