Emirates has replaced Bank of Ireland as sponsor of the seventh series of Dragons’ Den, which starts on RTÉ One on Sunday April 17 at 9.30pm. The show, presented by Richard Curran, has two new Dragons – Alison Cowzer and Eleanor McEvoy – along with Gavin Duffy, Barry O’Sullivan and Eamonn Quinn, who participated in the last series. So who are these Dragons and what are their finances like?

• Gavin Duffy has been a mainstay of the show since it started on RTE in 2009. In 1992 he founded his media consultancy business Dorland Training Ltd which owns Media Training. This venture helps senior executives to communicate their business messages internally and externally. In 2014, the company booked a profit of €22,000 and year-end debtors increased to €170,000 from €110,000 the year before, usually a sign of growth. Dorland Training's net worth at year-end was €175,000.

Back in the day, Duffy was a charter investor in north-east radio station LMFM and received a chunk of change when the station was bought by UTV for €11 million in 2004. In November 2015, Duffy exited from his shareholding in recruitment agency HRM Recruitment. Duffy owned 31% of the equity in Tallanco Ltd, the parent company of HRM Recruitment, which is led by Michael O’Leary. Duffy’s shares in Tallanco were bought by the company last November, and the shares were subsequently cancelled. HRM Recruitment booked a net profit of €260,000 in 2014 and ended the year with a net worth of €2,375,000, including €2,376,000 in cash.

Duffy also grossed €3.5 million recently when he sold properties on Ailesbury Road in Dublin 4. One house was sold for €1.7m in November 2015 and another was sold for €1.8m in February 2016.

• Barry O'Sullivan, one of the founders of Altocloud, has a proven track record of raising funds.  He sourced €250,000 from Enterprise Ireland in November 2013 and the taxpayers doubled up with another €250,000 in December 2014. Altocloud also raised €548,000 in funding from unidentified investors in November 2013. O’Sullivan is a former Cisco executive and Altocloud is a cloud-based platform that uses data analytics to improve interactions between call centres and customers. The company stated in March 2015 that it raised funding from Delta Partners, Digicel Group and ACT Venture Capital.

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Altoclound Ltd booked a loss of €1 million in the year to June 2015. Equity invested in June 2015 amounted to €1,043,000.  In addition the company was funded by €1,350,000 of loan notes which have a 6% interest coupon and are redeemable by end December 2019.

• Alison Cowzer’s recent business career has tracked that of Michael Carey. They were together in Jacob Fruitfield Food Group and now they’re undertaking a new large-scale biscuit venture, East Coast Bakehouse in Drogheda, where Cowzer is marketing and innovation director.

Cowzer and Carey have been very successful at raising money from taxpayers for their biscuit factory, with Enterprise Ireland investing €1,704,000 in September 2015.  To tap this state largesse, Carey and Cowzer first had to shake the trees to raise capital from private investors. Between April and September 2015, they rounded up €5,000,000. The investors included Larry Shields, Donard Gaynor, Roger Jupp, Patrick Joy, Stephen Twaddell, William Drew, Cyril Forbes, Alan Ryan and Lily O’Briens.

On current form Eleanor McEvoy is head and shoulders above her Dragon peers

• Eleanor McEvoy (51) is CEO and joint owner with George McEvoy (73) of Budget Energy, an electricity reseller in Northern Ireland. This business is incredibly successful. In its first year of trading, the year to June 2012, Budget Energy had turnover of £4.5 million and booked a loss of £105,000. Three years later, in 2014/15, turnover was £34 million and the net profit was £3 million. So on current form Eleanor McEvoy is head and shoulders above her Dragon peers. Previously, McEvoy was involved with vending company Pembroke Distributors, sold in 2001, and Phonecard Warehouse, which had a turnover of £50 million when it was sold in 2006.

• Eamonn Quinn, son of Feargal ‘Superquinn’ Quinn, will be able to advise the budding entrepreneurs on Dragons’ Den about the challenges of manufacturing in Ireland. Quinn is a director of Nualight, a large business that specialises in LED lighting for the retail sector and car parks. The company also manufactures electronic components for the LED OEM sector.

In 2014, Nualight moved manufacturing for the European market from Ireland to Poland, while production for the US market was transferred from Ireland to a third party manufacturer in Poland.

A modest portion of the Quinn family fortune that accrued from selling the Superquinn supermarket chain is invested in Nualight. The other two main investors are UK private equity firm Climate Change Capital, and the ESB under the guise of its Novusmedia investment arm.

As of March 2015, Nualight Ltd had €36 million equity invested and accumulated losses of €34 million. Turnover in the year to March 2015 was €24.6 million, with the operating loss pre-exceptionals coming in at €3.1 million. Restructuring charges of €2.4 million relating to relocation of manufacturing brought the operating loss for 2014/15 to €5.5 million.

Photo (L-R): Barry O'Sullivan, Alison Cowzer, Eleanor McEvoy, Gavin Duffy and Eamonn Quinn