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.

Sven Sabas, Co-Founder at Dragonfly, said: "We’ve spent our careers building startups, and we learned firsthand that a company's success is tied to the technology it chooses. These decisions can make or break products, and often shape the long-term fate of an entire business. As seasoned engineering and data leaders, we’ve built tech infrastructure from the ground up, making tough, high-stakes calls along the way. We didn’t always get things right. Tech moves quickly, but there’s a lack of reliable, up-to-date guidance to make these critical decisions. That gap revealed a huge opportunity for us to help organisations unlock their true potential and embrace modern tools with confidence in the age of AI. We're building Dragonfly to be the technology companion we always wished we had – one that empowers every company to make faster, better choices about the software they use to build and scale.”

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 Instead of scrolling through marketplaces filled with outdated and incomplete information, or sitting through lengthy sales demos, users will be able to ask Dragonfly questions; within seconds, Dragonfly will recommend a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.

“What struck me about Sean and Sven wasn't just their willingness to tackle this problem head-on; it was their embrace of its full complexity. Their depth of thinking and meticulous attention to detail set them apart. They're not looking for quick fixes or superficial solutions; they're building something fundamental. I'm excited to watch Dragonfly's vision unfold – this is exactly what our industry needs.”

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