Nick Jenkins is the British entrepreneur who turned an unusual school nickname into one of the UK’s best-known online retail brands. He founded Moonpig.com, the personalized greeting-card business, after returning to Britain from Russia and studying for an MBA at Cranfield University. Jenkins later became familiar to a wider television audience when he joined BBC Two’s Dragons’ Den in 2015, sitting alongside investors including Peter Jones, Deborah Meaden, Sarah Willingham and Touker Suleyman. His business career had already taken an unconventional route: before building an internet company, he studied Russian at the University of Birmingham and moved to Moscow in 1990, where he worked in commodities, including for the business that later became Glencore.
The idea for Moonpig took shape during Jenkins’s 1998–99 MBA at Cranfield University, where he developed its business plan as part of his entrepreneurship coursework. The website launched publicly in April 2000, when online shopping was far less established than it is today. The early years were difficult: Cranfield’s account of his entrepreneurial journey says the company lost about £1 million on turnover of only £95,000 in its first year and required several rounds of outside funding. The important signal was repeat demand from customers who liked being able to personalize individual cards online. Moonpig eventually reached break-even in 2005, and by the time it was sold in 2011 it had around five million customers. The sale to online photo company Photobox valued Moonpig at roughly £120 million, marking Jenkins’s transition from operating one fast-growing company to backing other founders and early-stage businesses.
That transition explains why many people also know Nick Jenkins from Dragons’ Den rather than only from Moonpig. He joined the program for its thirteenth series in 2015 and remained on the panel through Series 14, appearing in episodes broadcast into early 2017 before being replaced for the following series. One of his televised deals was a £75,000 investment in Double, a dating app built around double dates. Outside the program, his interest in start-ups began earlier: the UK Business Angels Association says he has been investing since 2008, while Cranfield reported in 2025 that he had invested in 28 start-ups, eight of them through his time on Dragons’ Den. He also returned to Cranfield in February 2025 to speak about entrepreneurship, resilience and Moonpig’s origins. That continuing connection gives his story a distinctive second act: an early internet retail bet followed by a major exit and years spent evaluating and supporting new businesses.
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