With disinformation on the rise, especially with the explosion of AI, corporations are only as vulnerable to its effects as individuals. Refute is a London-based startup that detects and responds to disinformation on behalf of those industrial corporations. It has now raised a £2.3 million ($2.9 million) pre-seed round led by UK investors Game fair And Episode 1.
There are many aspects that fuel disinformation attacks, akin to geopolitical instability and using generative AI to create misleading content.
More complex campaigns – often created by government-sponsored or industrial competitors – concentrate on corporations, their supply chains and even their executives. The result can have massive reputational and financial implications.
Tom Garnett, co-founder and CEO of Refute, told TechCrunch: “We find that existing customers often use social and media monitoring tools to grasp the specter of disinformation.” However, these are passive tools which are generally used for Marketing purposes… In our experience, such signals are misleading since the noise level is high and the narrative origin is obscured. The result’s that users are unable to grasp the total picture of the threat and due to this fact are unable to cope with it.”
This is clearly a growing area as several startups have emerged to tap into this market. Refute's competitors include Alethea ($30 million raised), Blackbird AI ($30.6 million), and Logically AI ($36.7 million).
However, Garnett claimed: “We provide each the detection and response parts of the answer. This sets us other than the market as other approaches are primarily focused on detection.”
Refute detects disinformation campaigns by detecting the behavior of an adversary “threat actor.”
Garnett began his profession in national security at Detica and BAE Systems, where he developed large-scale data analytics solutions to research criminal activity with a concentrate on terrorist attacks.
He recognized that similar underlying technology might be used to combat criminal activity within the industrial sector, including cyberattacks and financial crime: “This led to me taking over leadership of the federal government and cybersecurity business at Ripjar: selling, constructing and deploying Solutions for technology corporations. Financial services, oil and gas and government customers.”
His co-founder Vlad Galu grew up in Romania within the Eighties and Nineties and experienced the specter of disinformation firsthand. He told TechCrunch: “I began by constructing core web infrastructure and services in Romania and Central Eastern Europe… Building every thing from the bottom up in a time of latest technologies and limited legal frameworks meant we needed to implement multi-layered defense strategies against threats , which targeted each platforms and end users.”
Notion Capital and Amadeus Capital Partners also participated within the round. Refute also received angel investment from investors Charlie Songhurst, Carlos Espinal, James Chappell and Alastair Paterson.
Andrew Sheffield, director at Playfair Capital, said in an announcement: “The information landscape is changing: it’s harder than ever to differentiate fact from fiction, and the associated fee of spreading misleading content continues to fall…Tom and Vlad have greater than forty Years of experience in data evaluation, cybersecurity, countering terrorist attacks, identity management and money laundering.”