Dragonfly and UCL secure £704K grant to fix software stack security. August 17, 2026 Dragonfly and UCL School of Management have secured £704,863 in funding. Innovate UK awarded this grant for a new 18-month project. The initiative starts in August 2026. It addresses critical gaps in modern software security. The award comes from the Innovate UK Secure Software for Resilient Growth competition. This is a significant proportion of the £5 million fund that was available. Innovate UK gives this award to collaborative projects enabling adoption of the government's Software Security Code of Practice to drive growth of secure and resilient software supply chains. The growing problem of Software Security. Recent research shows companies use hundreds of software applications. Zylo's SaaS Management Index identified that in 2026 organisations use an average of 305 applications. AI adoption drives this number even higher. The challenge for organisations is whether their current security tools are fit for purpose in the age of AI. The UK Government's "A UK cyber growth action plan - final report" published in 2025, says, "cyber security products may lack efficacy, including the capability to deliver the security mission (fit-for-purpose)." One reason is that security tools were designed around a slower, more predictable threat model, while AI is changing the speed, scale, adaptability and attack surface. Current tools also often check only individual pieces of Software; they do not check the connection between systems and the threat that combinations of software tools offer. In addition, hidden data flows and shadow IT create even more vulnerabilities. The issue is significant, with Hackers taking advantage. Research collated by the UK Government identified the average cost as £195,000. The total cost to the UK economy is around £14.7 billion, or 0.5% of the UK's GDP. In addition, fraud costs around £755 million. The government released the Software Security Code of Practice in 2025. Many businesses do not have the skills or tools to check compliance manually. It is to address this, that Dragonfly and UCL will collaborate. The solution. The new project will build a secure stack advisory layer. Dragonfly will use its knowledge graph of 300,000 vendors. The system will encode 14 security principles as machine-readable data. It will cross-map these against ISO 27001, NIS2 and the EU Cyber Resilience Act. A compositional risk engine will evaluate entire software stacks. The engine traces data flows across tool boundaries. It detects weak links and shadow IT exposure. Findings will appear as plain-language recommendations. Non-technical leaders can act on these insights immediately. Sean King, Co-Founder at Dragonfly, leads the solution. He helped create the Dragonfly platform. This software intelligence stack identifies and keeps track of every piece of Software an organisation runs. It highlights waste, risks and rogue/shadow renewal before it costs the organisation more than it should. King said, "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." Adding academic rigour. Dragonfly will be supported by academic research led by Professor Onesun Steve Yoo and a team that will consist of three co-investigators: Dr Yi-Chun Akchen, Dr Yuri Resende Fonseca and Dr Aras Selvi. The UCL team brings deep expertise in optimisation, machine learning and decision-making under uncertainty. This expertise is directly relevant to evaluating technology stacks, where hundreds of tools must be assessed for interoperability, security and regulatory compliance. Professor Onesun Steve Yoo, Principal Investigator, UCL School of Management, said, "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." Dragonfly. Dragonfly was launched in October 2025 and has raised around 2.6 million in pre-seed funding led by Episode 1 Venture, with participation from Dreamcraft Ventures and Portfolio Ventures. The grant provided by Innovation UK is substantial and will help accelerate development of its next-generation capabilities. This partnership demonstrates UK leadership in business-academia collaboration. Sven Sabas, Co-Founder at Dragonfly and technical lead, said, "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." Enterprise times: what does this mean. Dragonfly has not yet disclosed specific grant spending details. Where Dragonfly currently describes its platform as a "trusted companion that helps businesses cut through the chaos and make confident, data-driven decisions that fuel growth, innovation, and efficiency." Does this funding mean that this will evolve into more of a cybersecurity solution that aims to spot the security loopholes that not only exist within existing systems but also between them?

London-based startup Dragonfly has raised €3 million in a pre-seed funding round to make software decision-making faster and smarter through AI.