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News
February 14, 2026
0
min read
Dragonfly raises £2.6 million pre-seed to help businesses get ahead with smarter decisions about software
Dragonfly, the world’s most powerful 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.
Sean King & Sven Sabas
Dragonfly Founders
February 14, 2026
0
min read
Sean King & Sven Sabas
Dragonfly Founders
Dragonfly raises £2.6 million pre-seed to help businesses get ahead with smarter decisions about software
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 instantly accessible to everyone, from individual professionals to enterprise leaders. The startup has compiled the world’s largest 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 proprietary 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 Instead of scrolling through marketplaces filled with outdated and incomplete information, or sitting through lengthy sales demos, users will be able to ask Dragonfly questions; within seconds, Dragonfly will recommend a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.
Hector Mason, General Partner at Episode 1, said: "Before Dragonfly, it was almost impossible to gather enough context about software tools to truly understand their capabilities, and whether they fit seamlessly within an existing stack. By solving this critical problem, made even more urgent with the rapid adoption of AI, Dragonfly has the potential to make every company on the planet operate more effectively.
Sam Bourton, co-founder and CTO at QuantumBlack, said: “I first met Sean and Sven after having spent three days with 150 CIOs and CTOs, witnessing firsthand the mounting complexity of the modern tech and data landscape. The explosion of GenAI and agentic systems has amplified the problem - leaders face a firehose of requests for new AI tools, with a thousand flowers blooming across their organisations, each demanding attention and resources. Taking stock of their existing tech stack, evaluating options, and managing security, dependencies, and integrations has never been harder.
To try Dragonfly for free, visit www.askdragonfly.com or see our social media channels for latest updates.
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Blog
February 12, 2026
0
min read
Stop buying AI tools. Start building an AI-Ready company.
This is Part 1 of our three-part series on AI Readiness. Part 2 dives into 'The Five Levels of AI Readiness', followed by part 3 which explores How Dragonfly Benchmarks Your Stack Against 250,000 Vendors.
Sean King & Sven Sabas
CoFounders of Dragonfly
February 12, 2026
0
min read
Sean King & Sven Sabas
CoFounders of Dragonfly
Everyone is talking about AI. Copilots. Agents. Autonomous workflows. But when we sit down with companies, Founders, CTOs, Ops Leaders; the reality looks nothing like the LinkedIn posts we read every day.
Most aren't blocked by a lack of tools. They're blocked by the way their business is built.
At Dragonfly, we've spent the last year mapping thousands of tech stacks across sales, support, engineering, HR, finance and marketing. What we've learned is blunt:
You don't become AI-ready by buying AI tools. You become AI-ready by changing how work flows through your company.
AI Readiness Is a Stance, Not a Purchase
Put differently: AI readiness is a stance, not a purchase. What is your organisation's posture towards this shift? What have you actually put in place, or changed, to enable this transition? If the answer is "we bought some new tools but nothing else is fundamentally different," you have the wrong stance. The tools will underperform, the investment will stall, and six months from now you'll be wondering why the AI revolution passed you by.
That's why we built the Dragonfly AI Readiness Framework; a new way to measure where your business actually is today, and what it will really take to move forward. The framework evaluates readiness across three pillars:
Technology — are you using the right tools for each stage of your core processes, or are you running yesterday's stack and expecting tomorrow's results?
Strategy — do you have clear direction on what AI should be doing for your business? Do you have policies for data use, risk mitigation, and fair use or are your teams experimenting in the dark?
People — are your teams equipped to work alongside AI? Are you building literacy, sharing knowledge, and creating a culture that actually adopts what you're investing in?
Today we're launching the first pillar of that framework: a technology benchmark that scores your tooling stack against the best in the market, department by department.
Your Software Is Not a Set of Tools. It's How Your Business Runs.
Before we get into the framework, we need to reframe how you think about your tech stack.
Across every team in every company, the same basic pattern exists. A customer is found. A task is created. Someone takes action. A result is delivered.
We call that pattern a process, the fundamental sequence of steps required to turn intent into outcome. Your software stack is simply how you choose to implement that process.
This distinction matters because most companies treat software as utility, a tool you buy to do a job. But software isn't a utility. It's the implementation of a process. And if you don't understand the process underneath, you can't evaluate whether the tools on top are helping or hiding the problem.
You don't become AI-ready by dropping AI into this flow. You become AI-ready by understanding how these processes really operate today, where humans are compensating for broken systems, where data gets lost, and where automation is pretending to be intelligent.
The Problem Nobody Wants to Admit
Almost every leadership team we speak to believes they're already operating at an advanced level. They have a CRM. They have dashboards. They've rolled out a copilot, maybe experimented with agents.
So they assume they're "AI ready."
But when we map their real workflows, the picture changes fast. Data is still being copied between systems by hand. Decisions still live in people's heads. Automation exists, but it's brittle, a patchwork of if/then rules duct-taped across tools that were never designed to work together.
You can't layer intelligence on top of fragmentation and expect transformation. You just end up with chaos, a lot more noise and more surface-level automation masking deeper structural problems.
AI doesn't fix broken processes. It exposes them.
The first step is understanding where you actually stand. Not in terms of how many tools you own, but in terms of what your software is really doing for you, and what it could be doing if your processes were built to support it.
In Part 2 of this series, we break down [The Five Levels of AI Readiness], what AI can actually do for you at each level, and why most companies are two levels lower than they think. We also walk through real examples in Outbound Sales and Customer Support to show what each level looks like in practice.
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