Season Recap

Dragons’ Den Season 22 Recap: Every Deal Worth Knowing

Season 22 by the numbers: 55 pitches, 32 deals, the biggest checks, and the products that are still selling.

Dragons' Den IndexUpdated 9 February 20266 min read

Series 22 of Dragons' Den, first broadcast 2025, put 55 pitches in front of the panel. 32 of them walked out with a deal, a strike rate of 58 percent, and the Dragons collectively put about £2.5M behind the businesses they backed.

That 58 percent deal rate is the highest of any series in our index so far, edging past the 56 percent recorded the series before it. Here is everything worth knowing about what happened in series 22.

How many pitches got a deal in series 22?

Of the 55 pitches that appeared in series 22, 32 secured investment, for a deal rate of 58 percent. That is up from the 56 percent deal rate in series 21, and it makes series 22 the most generous run of the show we have on record.

A rising deal rate does not mean the pitches got easier or the Dragons got softer. It more likely reflects a panel in transition, with Steven Bartlett and guest investors bringing different appetites to the table than the Dragons who came before them, and founders arriving better prepared than ever after two decades of the show setting expectations.

The biggest deal of series 22

The biggest single deal of series 22 went to Yuv Beauty, which secured £250,000 in exchange for just 2 percent equity. The investment came jointly from Steven Bartlett and Sara Davies.

A 2 percent stake for £250,000 values Yuv Beauty at £12.5 million at the point of the deal, one of the highest valuations any founder has walked away with a deal at in the show's history. Getting two Dragons to agree on a number that steep, rather than just one, says something about how strong that pitch must have looked in the room.

What the Dragons backed most in series 22

The categories that did best with the Dragons in series 22 were Food & Drink, Fashion & Beauty and Other. That mix is fairly typical for the show: Dragons' Den pitches range from kitchen gadgets to fintech apps, and a large share of any series does not sit neatly inside one retail category.

Food & Drink topping the list fits a long-running pattern. It is one of the categories the Dragons return to most often, partly because the products are cheap to sample on air and partly because several Dragons, Touker Suleyman and Sara Davies among them, have built careers around consumer retail and know the category cold.

Which series 22 businesses are still trading?

Series 22 is the most recent full run in our index. Its businesses are still in their first years after broadcast, which is early for the kind of trading record that shows up in company filings and retail listings.

Check back as the series matures. For older series we track survivorship company by company, and series 22 will get the same treatment once enough time has passed.