Refute has raised a £5 million seed round to expand its AI-driven platform for detecting and countering online manipulation amid accelerating disinformation threats across Europe and beyond. The UK company says it is responding to an intensifying “hybrid warfare” environment in which threat actors are blending bot infrastructure with influencer-driven campaigns, using agentic AI to automate operations end-to-end, and increasingly targeting commercial organisations alongside governments.
The company emerged from stealth after closing a pre-seed round in 2024 and says it has since built “military-grade” AI capabilities already in use by both commercial and government customers. Refute’s platform focuses on surfacing early-stage signals of online manipulation and delivering intelligence and recommended response strategies quickly enough to keep pace with attackers.
Refute says it has observed a sharp increase in disinformation activity affecting clients in high-risk sectors. The company pointed to coordinated influence operations impacting European elections, including Romania’s, where it identified more than 32,500 inauthentic TikTok videos it says were used to artificially amplify extremist candidates among the expat community. In the mining sector, Refute says its monitoring found that 40% of the mines it tracks are under attack from fake or misleading actors, highlighting the growing exposure of businesses to coordinated manipulation that can undermine reputations, institutions, and market value.
The £5 million seed financing will be used to grow Refute’s engineering organisation, expand detection models, and advance response capabilities across European markets. The round was led by Amadeus Capital Partners, with support from the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund, according to the company’s announcement.
KEY QUOTES
“Europe is facing the most significant wave of hybrid warfare in modern history. Disinformation is no longer just a peripheral nuisance, but now a reputational threat and strategic weapon targeting nations, institutions and corporations alike. Refute was created to meet this moment. We help governments and commercial organisations strengthen their resilience, protect their operations, and outpace their adversaries to function in an increasingly hostile information environment.”
Tom Garnett, CEO And Co-Founder, Refute
“The velocity of disinformation attacks has surged as threat actors adopt agentic AI, automated bot infrastructure and increasingly sophisticated influence tactics. This funding enables us to grow our engineering organisation, expand our detection models and advance our response capabilities across European markets. By accelerating innovation, we will increase our capacity to detect and neutralise emerging threats at exponentially growing scales.”
Vlad Galu, CTO And Co-Founder, Refute
“We are pleased to support Refute, a UK company whose technology significantly strengthens our resilience against disinformation. Refute is developing advanced, dual-use capabilities that can help safeguard democratic processes and ensure our collective security.”
NSSIF Spokesperson, National Security Strategic Investment Fund
“We’re delighted to lead Refute’s seed round, having originally invested at the pre-seed, to support the business building what we see as critical infrastructure for the future of a well-functioning society. Disinformation is one of the fastest growing risks globally for governments and enterprises. Tom and Vlad have demonstrated their ability to execute quickly and build a world leading set of capabilities which detects and responds to threats autonomously at the speed of the attackers. This is hugely valuable and is being demonstrated already with a significant pace of adoption from customers. We couldn’t be more excited to join this journey to build the dominant disinformation analytics product globally.”
James Baker, Principal, Amadeus Capital Partners
