UCL School of Management, in partnership with Dragonfly, has been awarded £704,863 ($1 million) to develop next-generation AI systems that help businesses make safer, more effective technology decisions.
Businesses today each operate hundreds of software tools, whilst simultaneously 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 struggle to answer this because they assess vendors one at a time, but real-world risk lies in the connections between tools, such as the data flows and integrations. Cyber attacks cost the UK economy an estimated £14.7 billion per year, with a fragmented, poorly secured software infrastructure among the weaknesses attackers exploit.
The UK Government’s Software Security Code of Practice (SSCoP) sets 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.
UCL School of Management and Dragonfly’s 18-month project will encode the SSCoP into the world’s first machine-queryable trust later, enabling organisations and AI agents alike to assess the security of entire technology stacks, not just individual tools.
The team will build a secure stack advisory layer on top of Dragonfly’s knowledge graph of more than 300,000 software vendors and encode all 14 SSCoP principles as machine-queryable attributes, cross-mapped to standards including ISO 27001, NIS2 and the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and detecting weakest links and shadow IT exposure, translating the findings into plain-language, citation-backed recommendations that non-technical decision makers can act on.
The funding from Innovate UK’s Secure Software for Resilient Growth competition will support research aiming to establish new approaches to technology trust, compliance and AI adoption as organisations increasingly embrace AI-native ways of working.
Sean King, co-founder at Dragonfly and project lead, 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.”
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.”
The research will be led at UCL by Professor Onesun Steve Yoo, Professor of Operations & Technology and Marketing & Analytics at UCL School of Management, as Principal Investigator, alongside 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, expertise directly relevant to the combinatorial challenge of evaluating technology stacks, where hundreds of tools must be assessed against interoperability, security and regulatory constraints.
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.”
The project, which begins in August 2026, forms part of Dragonfly’s wider vision to build the world’s most trusted intelligence layer for technology decisions. 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. Innovate UK’s support will accelerate the development of Dragonfly’s next-generation capabilities whilst contributing to the UK’s leadership position in AI innovation and helping businesses safely embrace the opportunities presented by AI-native ways of working.
