Dragonfly, an AI-powered software discovery platform, today announced the close of a £2.6m pre-seed round alongside the public launch of its conversational AI tool.
Founded in December 2024 by Zego alumni Sean King and Sven Sabas, the round was led by Episode 1, joined by Dreamcraft and Portfolio Ventures, with angels including QuantumBlack founder and CTO Sam Bourton, and Bolt founder and CEO Markus Villig.
The number of software tools has exploded in recent years. Tech users no longer find themselves facing a decision between an incumbent provider and a challenger; today, there may be hundreds of options to consider for any given job. The rise of AI and vibe-coding has rapidly accelerated the development of new applications, but substantially increased the time needed to evaluate the security, reliability and interoperability of different technologies. Expert advice on business architecture - from systems architects or management consultants - is inaccessible to the majority due to high costs, and the pace of innovation makes it impossible for anyone to stay up-to-date.
Dragonfly aims to make the expertise of a solutions architect more accessible to everyone, from individual professionals to enterprise leaders. The startup has compiled a large catalogue of software tools and their capabilities, currently standing at over 250,000 products, from a range of trusted data sources. This dataset feeds into a variety of AI-powered features, which will help users find the right tech stacks in seconds, rather than months.
Today, Dragonfly has made its conversational AI tool available to the public. Instead of scrolling through marketplaces filled with outdated and incomplete information, or sitting through lengthy sales demos, users will be able to ask Dragonfly questions; within seconds, Dragonfly will recommend a list of suitable products, ranked by relevance, with supporting explanations.
The tool is designed to cater for simple queries in plain language, such as "what’s the best project management software for a team of five that integrates with Google Calendar and has a free plan," and more complex prompts, for example "we need to build a secure, compliant technology architecture to support a new financial services product for our European customers; we need recommendations for tools that can handle real-time data ingestion, are GDPR-compliant, and integrate with our existing AWS infrastructure, and we'd also like to see how these tools would work together in a single blueprint."
From late 2025, Dragonfly is set to roll out its enterprise offering to help organisations build, manage and evolve their tech stacks. Businesses will be able to map out their software with the aid of Dragonfly’s ‘digital fingerprinting’ technology, which captures a blueprint of their business system architecture. With this detailed context, Dragonfly will supply insights and software recommendations tailored to each company’s environment, goals and growth stage.
King and Sabas have assembled a team of 12 with several former colleagues from Zego, Peppy and Permutive joining the founders in their new venture. The pre-seed funds will be used to develop a range of new features in support of the startup’s mission to build a comprehensive ‘Automated Solutions Architect’, further enrich Dragonfly’s data, and recruit select new hires as needed.
