Dragonfly AI secures €5.7 million to expand neuroscience-led creative testing
Dragonfly AI, a London-based company building predictive tools to test advertising and brand creative before it goes live, has raised €5.7 million (about £5 million) to accelerate product development and international growth. The funding round was led by 24Haymarket, with participation from Guinness Ventures and Foresight.
The company says its platform is already used by more than 70 global brands, including major FMCG names such as Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Coca-Cola and L’Oréal, to assess whether creative assets are likely to be noticed, emotionally engaging and memorable.
Board appointment and investor backing
Alongside the investment, Dragonfly AI is appointing Fiona Dent to its board of directors, strengthening governance as the company scales.
Steve King, CEO of Dragonfly AI, said the raise validates the firm’s “science-led approach and performance-tested technology.” He added that the company’s aim is to help customers improve the effectiveness of advertising spend and to embed its algorithms “directly into the tools and workflows they use every day.”
Tom Haywood, partner at 24Haymarket, pointed to the platform’s usability and underlying research pedigree, saying the company is “underpinned by a world-class algorithm developed at Queen Mary University of London” and has continued to grow during the investment process—factors that reinforced the investor’s conviction in its ability to scale.
What Dragonfly AI does—and why it claims to be different
Founded in 2018, Dragonfly AI positions itself as a creative testing solution designed to maximize creative effectiveness across digital, in-store and omnichannel environments. The company says it can predict how people will see, feel and remember creative content, providing brands with actionable feedback before campaigns are launched.
The platform combines insight across attention, emotion and memory—three variables that marketers increasingly try to quantify as ad budgets shift toward measurable performance outcomes. In practice, tools like these are used to compare multiple versions of an ad, packaging design or digital asset, and to identify elements that may reduce impact, such as cluttered layouts, weak focal points or messaging that fails to land.
A key part of Dragonfly AI’s pitch is that its approach does not rely on conventional training data in the way many AI models do. The company argues that this can help it sidestep certain biases that may be introduced when models learn from historical datasets, particularly in creative contexts where past performance may not generalize well across audiences, cultures or channels.
Roots in academic neuroscience
The biological algorithm behind the product was developed in the neuroscience department at Queen Mary University of London. Hamit Soyel, a fellow associated with that work, serves as chief scientist and inventor at Dragonfly AI, according to the company.
The firm has also integrated into industry platforms such as CreativeX, reflecting a broader trend toward embedding creative analytics directly into enterprise marketing stacks rather than operating as standalone tools.
How the new funding will be used
Dragonfly AI said it will use the new capital to accelerate several priorities:
- Rolling out new Emotion & Memory metrics to deepen predictive insight.
- Expanding video analysis across platforms, as video continues to dominate digital ad formats.
- Growing Dragonfly Connect, its enterprise integration layer aimed at embedding capabilities into customer workflows.
- Expanding US sales and customer success teams.
- Continuing investment in research and product innovation.
Context: a measured but active European market for AI creative tools
The round lands amid continued, if selective, investment in applied AI tools across Europe in 2025 and early 2026, particularly in categories adjacent to marketing, content and enterprise decision-making. Recent UK activity in the wider AI applications space has included a separate London startup named Dragonfly (not affiliated with Dragonfly AI) raising €3 million at pre-seed to build AI decision-making software, and Wonder securing €2.6 million for an AI-powered creative studio focused on generative visual content.
Elsewhere in Europe, Italy-based Covision Media raised €5 million to scale AI-enabled 3D content and product visualization technology—another indicator that investors remain interested in tools that sit between creative production and measurable commercial outcomes.
Against this backdrop, Dragonfly AI’s €5.7 million raise stands out for both its size and its narrower focus on neuroscience-led creative effectiveness, reinforcing London’s role as a hub for applied AI companies building tools for marketing and enterprise workflows.
With major consumer brands already on its client roster and fresh capital to expand product capabilities and US go-to-market, Dragonfly AI is betting that predictive creative testing will become a standard step in how large advertisers plan and optimize campaigns.
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