Refute, a counter disinformation startup, has raised £5m in a seed round led by Amadeus Capital Partners, with participation from Playfair, Episode 1, Osney Capital and the National Security Strategic Investment Fund. Refute protects organisations and democracies from hybrid warfare and disinformation threats by identifying and responding to online manipulation. The funding will support Refute’s mission to address escalating disinformation activity targeting governments and commercial organisations.
Hybrid warfare tactics are evolving as threat actors blend bot farms with influencers, deploy agentic AI for end-to-end automation and increasingly target commercial organisations alongside governments. Refute has built military-grade capabilities that surface early-stage signals of online manipulation and provide intelligence and recommended response strategies at the pace of attackers. Since emerging from stealth and closing its pre-seed round in 2024, Refute’s technology has been adopted by leading commercial and government customers.
Refute has identified more than 32,500 inauthentic TikTok videos artificially amplifying extremist candidates during European elections, including Romania’s, and found that 40% of the mines it tracks are under attack from fake or misleading actors. These activities aim to infiltrate online conversations, undermine institutions and erode public trust, creating risks for businesses, reputations and market value.
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, Co-founder & CEO
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, Co-founder & CTO
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 at Amadeus Capital Partners
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.
Spokesperson, National Security Strategic Investment Fund
