UK-based counter-disinformation startup Refute has raised £5 million in seed funding as it bets that automated defence, rather than human-led fact-checking, can turn the hunt for disinformation from a worthy cause into a viable business.
The round was led by Amadeus Capital Partners, with participation from Playfair, Episode 1, Osney Capital, and the National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), the UK government’s dual-use venture fund focused on national security and defence technologies.
Refute emerged from stealth last year and positions itself as a defence tech response to what its founders describe as a surge in “hybrid warfare” tactics that blend online influence operations, bot networks, agentic AI, and human amplification.
Disinformation tools have come and gone over the years, many of them built for trying to fight the issue on social media platforms, particularly in the wake of the Brexit referendum and elections that many deemed had been influenced nefariously by “fake news.” Unlike those earlier efforts, Refute has a different focus. The startup is selling directly to governments and commercial organisations facing what it believes are urgent, high-value reputational and operational threats.
“Refute is fundamentally rethinking the business model for disinformation defence,” Tom Garnett, CEO and co-founder of Refute, told Resilience Media in an interview. “Earlier approaches mainly relied on fact-checking for social media platforms, managed by strategic comms firms and external analysts, whereas we are focused on using an AI solution to directly protect governments and commercial organisations from urgent, high-value threats.”
Garnett said the retreat by major platforms such as Meta and X from active content policing has exposed the limits of the old model. Refute’s approach, he said, uses “advanced generative AI to automate detection and response,” allowing the company to scale without the labour-intensive processes that made earlier disinformation efforts expensive and difficult to sustain.
“This direct-to-organisation, product-led approach, combined with growing demand from both public and private sectors due to the geopolitical situation we find ourselves in, has allowed us to build a resilient and sustainable business where others might have struggled,” he said.
We highlighted earlier this year how we think that disinformation will be a key issue in Europe for 2026, not least because of the ongoing war in Ukraine, but also because of elections.
It looks like we are not the only ones. The investor lineup underscores how little separation there is now between national security and commercial targets. With NSSIF on the table, Refute joins a growing group of UK defence-leaning startups selling the same core technology to both government and enterprise customers.
“The types of threat actors currently proliferating do not distinguish between government and commercial targets,” Garnett said. “In fact, their tactics and the risks they pose are often identical.”
Refute says its technology is already deployed across both sectors, with customers including the UK government and organisations in industries such as mining and legal services. The company declined to disclose customer numbers but said it focuses on critical infrastructure and high-value commercial sectors where disinformation can directly affect safety, markets, or operations.
The scale of the problem is illustrated by recent work cited by the company. During European elections, including Romania’s, Refute identified tens of thousands of inauthentic TikTok videos used to artificially amplify extremist candidates among expatriate communities.
Over the past year, Garnett said, government-focused disinformation campaigns have become more frequent and more sophisticated. “Election interference and attempts to erode public trust are especially prevalent, with activity intensifying in the lead-up to major elections across Europe and beyond,” he said, adding that similar campaigns are expected elsewhere.
The new funding will be used primarily to expand Refute’s engineering team across Europe and to further develop its automated detection and response capabilities.
Garnett said the company is also focused on building a diverse workforce, noting that several team members have firsthand experience of living through conflict and disinformation campaigns.
“There is definitely an arms race underway,” he said, referring to the use of generative AI and automation by both attackers and defenders. “Our approach is designed to make advanced disinformation defence accessible not just to large states and well-funded companies, but also to medium and smaller organisations.”
From the investor side, Amadeus framed Refute as part of a broader portfolio tackling complex, systemic risks.
Nick Kingsbury, partner at Amadeus Capital Partners, told Resilience Media that the firm sees disinformation as a global problem with clear national security implications. “It’s an example of a global problem that certainly has potential national security and defence customers”, he said. “[Refute] has taken a novel approach to solving that problem.”
Whether Refute can succeed where earlier disinformation ventures failed will depend on whether organisations are willing to treat information warfare as an operational risk rather than a PR headache. For now, with government backing, VC support, and a worsening geopolitical backdrop, the company believes timing is firmly on its side.
