London's AI sector raised $9.4bn in the first half of 2026 alone – 98% of all UK AI investment in that period, according to Tracxn's UK AI H1 2026 Report. Dragonfly AI is one of the companies behind that number.

Headquartered in London and built on patented technology developed at Queen Mary University of London, Dragonfly AI is a London AI success story with more than a decade of neuroscience research underneath it – and a growing roster of the world's biggest consumer brands as customers.

A patented breakthrough from Queen Mary University of London

Dragonfly AI's core technology did not start in a boardroom. It started in the neuroscience department at Queen Mary University of London, where the late Professor Peter McOwan and Dr Hamit Soyel spent years building a computational model of how the human eye decides what to look at first – originally developed for robotics. Their saliency algorithm simulates the biology of visual attention directly, rather than training on eye-tracking data, and is protected by three granted patent families held by Queen Mary University of London and exclusively licensed to Dragonfly AI.

Validated against professional eye-tracking panels, the model achieves 91% relative accuracy – the gold standard for attention measurement. Dr Soyel, now Dragonfly AI's chief scientist and inventor, continues to lead the science team, and Queen Mary's machine learning researchers remain among the UK's most recognised: several were named among the UK's top 100 researchers by Research.com in 2026.

From a London lab to a global CPG platform

Founded by Steve King, David Mitchell, Mark Bainbridge and James Harvey, Dragonfly AI launched commercially in 2019, more than a decade after the original research began. Today, the platform is used by more than 50 global CPG businesses, including Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Coca-Cola and L'Oréal, to predict how creative content will be seen, remembered and felt before it goes live.

The company remains headquartered in London, with a team of 40+ working across the UK, Europe and the US. A £5m investment round led by 24Haymarket, alongside Guinness Ventures and Foresight, in January 2026 is funding the next stage of that growth – including expansion into new markets and continued investment in the science.

Part of a fast-growing UK AI ecosystem

Dragonfly AI's story is also a story about where AI companies are being built. London captured $9.4bn of the UK's $9.6bn total AI funding in the first half of 2026 – almost 50 times more than every other UK city combined (Tracxn).

Universities are a significant part of that pipeline. Dragonfly AI's own journey – from a Queen Mary University of London research lab to a platform trusted by five of the world's ten largest FMCG suppliers – is a live example of how UK academic research is being converted into commercially proven, exportable AI. It is exactly the kind of route the UK's push to turn research strength into economic growth is banking on, and one that London-based, university-rooted companies like Dragonfly AI are already living out.