Disinformation refuting company Refute, has raised £2.3 million in a Pre-Seed funding. 

Disinformation attacks have become a Board-level concern, fuelled in recent years by both growing geopolitical instability and widespread use of generative AI to create and propagate disinformation.

The most damaging disinformation takes the form of sophisticated campaigns that focus on the company, its executives, and the supply chain. 

Threat actors are often state-sponsored or commercial competitors, and even people taking advantage of an opportunity to make money. These campaigns are coordinated across channels, including news, social media, blogs and forums. 

Refuture is a London-based company fighting disinformation on behalf of commercial organisations, detecting and responding to campaigns at the speed of the attackers. It takes a quantitative approach to discovering and fighting disinformation campaigns, fusing together interconnected data and tracking narratives across multiple channels. 

Using this data to model and score threat behaviours in context and over time it enables effective in-channel response at the speed of the attackers. 

Refute allows companies to discover attacks earlier, uncover any under-the-radar attacks, reduce the noise of false positives, and optimise an organisation’s response to cross-channel coordinated campaigns. 

Tom Garnett, co-founder and CEO at Refute, says:

“Commercial organisations are largely unprotected from disinformation campaigns, which can have devastating consequences on the resilience of society.

Companies can lose out on contracts worth many millions, or see their valuations reduced significantly. By protecting organisations from malicious coordinated attacks, we are implementing a line of defence for all stakeholders involved in these essential services.” 

Playfair and Episode 1 led the round, with participation from Notion Capital and Amadeus Capital Partners. Refute also received angel investment from Charlie Songhurst, Carlos Espinal, James Chappell and Alastair Paterson.

According to Andrew Sheffield, Principal at Playfair Capital, the changing information landscape makes it harder than ever to tell fact from fiction, and the cost of spreading misleading content continues to fall. The World Economic Forum cited disinformation as the number one global risk in 2024. 

“Tom and Vlad possess forty-plus years of experience in data analysis, cybersecurity, tackling terrorist attacks, identity management and money laundering.

We believe they are perfectly placed to tackle this important global issue and are excited to be on the journey with them.”

Simon Murdoch, Managing Partner at Episode 1, says, 

“Generative AI has presented the opportunity to create falsified information at scale, enabling large-scale disinformation attacks to be deployed quickly and cheaply. 

However, this same technology can be utilised as part of the solution, resulting in a step change in capability for detection and response.” 

Lead image: Refute. Photo: uncredited.