London, UK – (27th January 2026) – Refute, the AI-powered counter disinformation company, today announces it has raised £5m in seed funding to accelerate its mission to protect organisations and democracies from the rapidly evolving landscape of hybrid warfare and disinformation threats. The round was led by deep tech specialist Amadeus Capital Partners, with participation from Playfair, Episode 1, Osney Capital and the National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), the UK Government’s deep tech venture capital fund that invests in dual-use technologies for national security and defence.
Refute’s founders have over forty years of experience creating technologies to fight terrorist attacks and financial crime, and elevate internet trust. As hybrid warfare intensifies, threat actors are rapidly evolving their tactics, blending bot farms with influencers, deploying agentic AI for end‑to‑end automation, and increasingly targeting commercial organisations alongside governments.
Since emerging from stealth and closing its pre-seed round in 2024, Refute has built military‑grade AI capabilities now used by leading commercial and government customers. The platform surfaces early‑stage signals of online manipulation, providing intelligence and recommended response strategies at the pace of the attackers.
Refute has tracked a sharp rise in disinformation threats on behalf of its clients in high risk industries. For example, recent European elections, such as Romania’s, have been affected by coordinated influence operations, with Refute identifying more than 32,500 inauthentic TikTok videos artificially amplifying the reach of extremist candidates in the expat community. Elsewhere, Refute’s monitoring in the mining sector has found 40% of the mines it tracks to be under attack from fake or misleading actors.
These efforts aim to infiltrate online conversations, undermine institutions, and erode public trust, creating serious risks for businesses, reputations, and market value.
Tom Garnett, CEO and Co-Founder of Refute, said, “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.”
Vlad Galu, CTO and Co-Founder of Refute, said, “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.”
An NSSIF spokesperson said: “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.”
James Baker, Principal at Amadeus Capital Partners, added, “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.”
