Dragonfly, a technology intelligence startup, has secured £704,863 in funding from Innovate UK in partnership with researchers from UCL School of Management. Awarded through Innovate UK's Secure Software for Resilient Growth competition and shared across Dragonfly and UCL, the funding supports an 18-month project beginning in August 2026.
Businesses today face more technology choices than ever before, with the average organisation operating hundreds of software tools whilst grappling with the rapid emergence of AI systems and autonomous agents. Technology leaders are increasingly asked not only which tools they should adopt, but whether those technologies can safely and effectively work together. Existing security tools cannot answer that question, because they assess vendors one at a time, while real-world risk lives in the connections between tools: the data flows, integrations, shadow IT and over-privileged connectors that link a modern technology stack together. A business can select ten individually secure products and still end up with a dangerously insecure whole.
Cyber attacks cost the UK economy an estimated £14.7 billion a year, with fragmented, poorly secured software infrastructure among the weaknesses attackers exploit. The UK Government published the Software Security Code of Practice in January 2025 to set a baseline for software security across supply chains, but most businesses lack the tools or expertise to check whether their software stack meets these standards, or to make security-informed decisions when choosing new tools.
The collaborative project will close this gap by building a secure stack advisory layer on top of Dragonfly's knowledge graph of more than 300,000 software vendors. All 14 SSCoP principles will be encoded as machine-queryable attributes, cross-mapped to standards including ISO 27001, NIS2 and the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and a compositional risk engine will evaluate complete multi-vendor stacks, tracing data flows across tool boundaries, detecting weakest links and shadow IT exposure, and translating findings into plain-language, citation-backed recommendations that non-technical decision makers can act on.
Founded in December 2024 by Zego alumni Sean King and Sven Sabas, Dragonfly launched publicly in October 2025 alongside a £2.6m pre-seed round led by Episode 1, joined by Dreamcraft and Portfolio Ventures. The research will be led at UCL by Professor Onesun Steve Yoo as Principal Investigator, alongside co-investigators Dr Yi-Chun Akchen, Dr Yuri Resende Fonseca and Dr Aras Selvi, a team bringing expertise in optimisation, machine learning and decision-making under uncertainty.
We're entering a world where every business will have both human and AI colleagues working together. The technology decisions organisations make over the next decade will fundamentally shape their ability to innovate, compete and adopt AI safely. This partnership with UCL allows us to tackle some of the hardest problems in technology decision making. Innovate UK's support is an incredible validation of both the problem and the opportunity ahead.
Today, businesses are expected to understand not only whether a piece of software is best-in-class, but whether it's secure, compliant, interoperable and appropriate within the wider context of their organisation. That's becoming an impossible task to solve manually. Together with UCL, we're building the intelligence layer that will help businesses understand not just what technology exists, but how it should work together: encoding the reasoning of an expert security consultant into a system that any business, or any AI agent, can query in seconds.
As businesses increasingly rely on complex ecosystems of software and AI systems, there is a growing need for trustworthy and explainable approaches to technology decision making. This collaboration brings together cutting-edge academic research with real-world industry challenges to develop practical solutions that can help organisations navigate complexity with greater confidence. We're excited by the opportunity to contribute both rigorous research and meaningful impact through this partnership.
