The UK television programme Dragon's Den first introduced its five-investor panel in 2005.
The BBC version premiered in the United Kingdom on 4 January 2005. Its central setup placed entrepreneurs before a panel of five wealthy investors, who could question the proposals and decide whether to make offers. The five-Dragon arrangement became one of the format’s defining visual and dramatic features.
The show’s launch year is sometimes confused with the year later investors joined. Deborah Meaden arrived in series 3, while other familiar Dragons entered in subsequent series. Those changes altered the panel’s membership, but not the basic five-investor structure established at launch.
The programme was adapted from the Japanese format Money Tigers and became one of the BBC’s best-known factual-entertainment series. Its title uses the plural “Dragons” because multiple investors sit in the Den together.