Refute is a pure tech company focused on fighting disinformation attacks. We're automating a significant amount of the process so that we can keep ahead of the attacker.

Tom Garnett CEO & co-founder of Refute

Tom studied electronic engineering at Cambridge from 2001 to 2006 at St Catharine’s college specialising in instrumentation and control. He then worked in National Security creating data analysis solutions to fight terrorist attacks. He has had senior leadership roles in BAE Systems and Ripjar where he has managed business units building and selling solutions to fight cyber attacks and financial crime.

We spoke to Tom about his path from Cambridge to co-founding Refute

At the start of my career I was building very large-scale data analysis solutions to fight criminal activity with a particular focus on counter terrorism following 9/11 and the London 2005 attacks. A lot of the work I did back in those early days was about reducing the risk associated to the terrorist threat in the UK and wider.

I then moved to Muscat in Oman. I ran the BAE Systems business focused on cyber security and national security delivering large-scale complex solutions to tackle criminal activity within Oman.

I then joined a company called Ripjar, a startup of 25 people, focused on finding criminal activity be it financial crime, cyber-attacks or government related risks. I was part of their journey to becoming a 160-person organisation. As part of the leadership team I ran the government and cyber security part of the business, building and delivering solutions into military, policing, commercial organisations and particularly large tech.

I saw that the next wave of risk was in disinformation which has been around for thousands of years but certainly came to public prominence around the 2016 US election.

There has been massive change over the last couple of years with geopolitical tensions around the world including Gaza, Ukraine and China, but also the advent of generative AI making it much easier to create disinformation and to propagate disinformation attacks.

The risk to the democratic process and the impact on elections is clear but there's also highly impactful attacks on corporates, particularly high-risk organisations, whether that's oil and gas, mining, renewables, financial services and pharmaceuticals. This is particularly the case where the supply chains are in risky geographies where there's high commercial competition and state sponsored threats. For example, in the mining industry attacks can completely cut off the organisation’s ability to make revenue from their mines. This has huge financial impacts with hundreds of millions to billions off company valuations and it's now becoming a board level risk on the main risk register.

The online safety bill in UK and the EU digital services act are not covering these disinformation risks for commercial organisations. It's up to the organisations to protect themselves.

Tell us about Refute

Refute is a pure tech company focused on fighting disinformation attacks. We're automating a significant amount of the process so that we can keep ahead of the attacker. We focus on both detecting the threat and responding. It's important for us that we do both because you can have just minutes or hours to both detect and respond to these campaigns before they have huge financial and reputational impacts particularly to commercial organisations. 

From a detection perspective we're monitoring against the organisation, whether it's their executives, the organisation itself or the supply chain. We're understanding the narratives that have been spread, then we're looking for and identifying the behaviours associated with the campaigns. We build machine learning models to identify these different behaviours.

We have recently announced the closure of our pre-seed funding round where we secured £2.3m from Playfair, Episode 1, Amadeus and Notion Capital.

What motivated you to study engineering at Cambridge?

Like a lot of engineers, I have always been interested in how things work, building engineering products along the way. But for me it's always been around delighting and exciting the end user; that engineering technological edge mixed with design and marketing. 

I had an interest in electronics, but I wanted to be more general so that I could experience the different types of engineering and then really hone down on where I wanted to end up. What I didn't expect was that I'd go down the software route. 

The industry had changed significantly in terms of offering much more opportunity in the software engineering side. That's where a lot of the large growth was, particularly if you want to set up a tech startup further down the line. One of the things that interested me was the possibility to rapidly reproduce a product when it's based on software and have that very stackable license sale.

Do you have any standout moments from the four years at Cambridge?

It was the final year project which brought together pure engineering to solve a real-life challenge. My project was an electronics solution based around Zigbee wireless technology that allows smart devices to communicate with each other.

The other key element that I remember fondly is that the Cambridge engineering degree isn't just theoretical it mixes the business aspects as well which is great for those with an entrepreneurial mindset. The modules that were fused together with the Judge Business School whether it was marketing or pure business management, these modules were key for me. One module we looked at the wider business aspects analysing Cambridge startups and scale-ups understanding their accounts, how and why they were performing, why they weren't, who their competition was etc and that bit really stood out for me.

What inspired you into your field?

I wanted to be in the space of building solutions and being very close to end customers, delighting them and meeting their end user needs. When I graduated in 2006 terrorism was particularly high threat and there was high need for software solutions in that space. So, it was almost by chance that I ended up in that area and that's been the backbone of my whole career ever since, along with the move to the commercial space.

Even before studying at Cambridge, I knew I eventually wanted to be running my own company. It was by following that backbone of solving criminal activity challenges and eventually seeing that it was moving from a bespoke solution to having a viable product company in that space that I then started up Refute with my co-founder, Vlad Galu.

How did your career develop?

One of the key things for me was getting first hand product company startup experience. I started work at Ripjar seven years ago when it was a startup and an amazing company, great technology, and highly talented people. I learned a lot about good decisions and the positive ways the company has developed but of course we hit challenges on the way which we solved, and I think going through that whole experience was so valuable, then to be able to apply a lot of those lessons and positives across to your own company.

Have you had a career defining moment?

The realisation that there is a productised version of these very complex bespoke data analysis solutions for solving government related risks which are reproducible for sale into commercial organisations for solving a much wider selection of risks. That for me is the key thing. If you look at the Cambridge ecosystem that's the same story with a number of startups that have been very successful for example Darktrace.

What contribution to your field are you most proud of and why?

Building data analysis solutions into the government post the London 2005 attacks to solve terrorism threats.

What do you see as being the next big thing in your field? 

Generative AI is an interesting one. The most important element is the threat landscape. We see the next big thing in our field is how the threat actors are harnessing some of the technological advances in generative AI to massively scale the disinformation campaigns.

It doesn't take 100 people in a room linked to a nation state it can now be one person on their mobile phone creating very realistic campaigns which can have massive impacts on organisations.

What is the best career decision you've made?

I think the key thing for me was getting firsthand experience within another startup company as they scale up and going through that journey.

What is your advice for someone considering a career in engineering?

The world feels like it's changed a lot since I studied engineering. Back then at least 50% of engineering graduates didn't go into traditional engineering industries when they left. That world has now changed. Of course, there will always be engineering graduates going into very well-paid industries which are less engineering focussed but there’s this whole different career path now whether it's working for someone else's startup, a tech scale up or one of the big tech firms, whether that's a US-based or European or UK. Engineering opens a whole range of opportunities including staying very technical and theoretical in research, right the way through to running your own tech company at the other end of the spectrum. If you want to leave your options open and have the biggest selection of career paths including working in big tech or starting your own tech company, having the biggest impact in the world, then I think engineering is that course.

A podcast with Tom Garnett and Vlad Galu 'Tackling one of the world's biggest risks: disinformation'