At Mansion House earlier this month, the Lady Mayor’s Defence & Resilience Showcase introduced an unusual method for judging technology companies: attendees were given virtual currency to back the ventures they thought showed the greatest promise. In a room filled with defence contractors, security vendors, investors and government customers, a counter-disinformation company like Refute might once have looked like the odd one out. Yet Refute came out on top, named the best dual-use company and featuring in Sky News’ Defence Insider coverage of the event. The showcase was the first in its series to focus on defence and national resilience, and it took place against a backdrop of war in Europe, daily cyber threats and rapidly changing methods of conflict. The organisers deliberately brought technology companies together with investors, government customers and established defence organisations, creating an environment in which the boundaries between national security, commercial technology and civil resilience were hard to draw. Refute’s victory was a sign of how far the information threat has moved up the agenda. Its platform is designed to surface early signs of online manipulation, trace narratives as they develop, and provide intelligence and recommended responses while a campaign is still emerging. At the event, trust was represented by virtual currency and allocated with a click; in the real world, trust takes years to earn, minutes to weaken and far longer to rebuild. The choice of Refute as the winner suggested that the people in that room understood that protecting the information environment is now as critical as protecting physical infrastructure. The symbolism was not lost on observers: information warfare has moved from the margins to the mainstream of defence thinking, and the companies that can help governments and businesses navigate that new reality are increasingly seen as vital.
Less than two weeks later, the UK Prime Minister announced the creation of the National Centre for Information Defence. Its proposed role is to detect, attribute and disrupt hostile-state information attacks. The announcement came with a warning that artificial intelligence would only aid the scale of disinformation campaigns, and it was accompanied by a stark account of Russian activity: agencies have already used bots, fake websites, falsified newspaper articles and forged branding from 28 British organisations to spread false narratives and sow division. Days after that, the Government said that CEOs and industry representatives from defence and critical national infrastructure would receive closed-door briefings on threats posed by Russia. Disinformation appeared alongside cyber attacks and sabotage as tactics used to disrupt organisations, take activity offline and weaken trust. The timing was striking. A defence showcase had just chosen a counter-disinformation company as its most promising dual-use technology, and now Whitehall was moving with unusual speed to institutionalise the response. The threat is not abstract. A cyber attack can compromise the systems an organisation relies on; a disinformation campaign can compromise the confidence people place in the information distributed by those systems. It can make a genuine warning look questionable, manufacture the appearance of a crisis or imitate a trusted source. Trust in online content is already at an all-time low with the proliferation of AI-generated material. A recent Ofcom study on news consumption and distribution found that 56% of UK adults were less trustful of an AI-written news story than one written by a person. The combination of AI-generated content and state-backed manipulation means that the information environment has become a battlefield in its own right, and the Government’s announcements are a recognition that the UK needs a dedicated capability to defend it. The new centre is not merely a research exercise; it is intended to be an operational response to a threat that is growing more sophisticated and more difficult to counter.
The distinction between cyber and information operations is central to understanding the new threat landscape. Cybersecurity became a board-level concern when companies understood that an attack could stop the business. Information defence is following a similar path because trust affects how an organisation communicates, operates and makes decisions under pressure. Communications teams may see the public narrative; security teams may spot suspicious behaviour; government may hold intelligence about the threat behind it. But leaders still must decide whether and how to respond. Earlier this year, the newsletter argued that counter-disinformation was beginning to look like cybersecurity did a decade ago, and the recent announcements back that claim. Refute’s platform is built to help governments and commercial organisations act at the speed of the attackers, rather than after the false narrative has already become the crisis. It surfaces early signs of online manipulation, traces narratives as they develop, and recommends responses while a campaign is still emerging. That approach treats disinformation not as a communications problem to be handled after the fact, but as a security threat to be detected and disrupted in real time. The Mansion House showcase made the same point in a different register: when attendees were given virtual currency to allocate to the most promising companies, they chose the one that protects the information environment. Protecting trust has become a job for government, business and technology working together. That message is likely to resonate across the defence and national resilience community, where the ability to maintain trust in the face of hostile activity is increasingly seen as a critical capability. The challenge is not simply to produce better content or more fact-checking; it is to defend the underlying infrastructure of information, just as the UK has spent the past decade defending its networks and systems. The Ofcom statistic is one measure of the scale of the challenge: if a majority of adults already distrust AI-written news, the task of defending information becomes harder with every advance in generative technology.
The rest of the newsletter provided a reminder that this work spans a wide range of technologies. Under the Intelligence theme, Altana partnered with Unusual Machines to improve supplier verification, traceability and compliance across drone-component manufacturing, addressing a vulnerable point in the defence supply chain. iPronics raised $125m for AI networking in a Series B co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, with NVIDIA joining the round and Amadeus participating; the company also began a two-year collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to integrate its programmable optical switching platform into GPU and high-performance computing infrastructure. Photonic proposed Project VANGUARD, a C$500m semiconductor manufacturing facility in British Columbia serving quantum, AI and defence technologies, and expanded its work with Microsoft to improve quantum-resource estimates and help developers understand the hardware needed for useful applications. Pimloc added documents to its privacy platform, expanding Redact beyond video, audio and images to support PDFs, emails, scanned records and Microsoft Office files; Surrey Police and Sussex Police signed a joint multi-year contract to use it for sensitive video and audio. planqc delivered the first MAQCS hardware to the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, marking an early step towards installing a 1,000-qubit neutral-atom quantum computer, won a Made in Europe Award, and saw its LOGIQC proposal selected for Germany’s national quantum competition. PolyAI launched Wren, an agent that analyses customer conversations, identifies weak points and tests proposed improvements before deployment. Riverlane expanded Deltakit with new compile and visualisation packages, demonstrated a closed real-time error-correction loop with Qblox, opened a US headquarters in Maryland’s Discovery District, and signed an agreement with Infleqtion to combine Deltaflow with neutral-atom hardware and Superstaq software. Sitehop expanded into the US with an office in Arlington, Virginia, focused on defence, national security and critical infrastructure. V7 connected with Affinity for investment teams and published customer stories on 10 East and OpenAI. XMOS brought voice AI to television by joining RedSquid TV’s agentic television ecosystem. The common thread across these announcements is resilience: resilience of supply chains, of computing infrastructure, of communications networks and of the systems on which modern societies depend.
In the Human theme, iPremom raised €15m in a seed round led by Amadeus to support clinical validation and commercial development of its first-trimester MaiRa blood-test platform for earlier pregnancy risk prediction. Ori Biotech signed a 10-year manufacturing agreement worth up to $120m to move a commercial cell-therapy programme onto its IRO manufacturing platform. Nuclera appointed Carl Raimond as Chief Executive, while co-founder Michael Chen moved into the role of Chief Scientific and Business Officer. Oxford Nanopore joined an NHS brain-tumour pilot exploring whether rapid sequencing can classify tumours during surgery and support faster treatment decisions, and joined RISE, a global rare-disease network expanding access to genomic testing for families with unresolved genetic conditions. On the Planet theme, Paragraf became the only international member of the K-Graphene Commercialisation Council in South Korea, supporting efforts to move graphene technologies into industry; received three awards for scale-up progress, international growth and innovation; saw CEO Simon Thomas named Business Leader; and moved beyond graphene to become lead industrial partner in the £6.4m NEED2D programme, which is developing ultra-low-energy electronics using next-generation two-dimensional materials. OKAPI published new technical analysis on modelling satellite fragmentation and its effect on the orbital environment, a reminder that resilience extends to space as well as to networks and supply chains. These human and planetary applications may seem distant from the defence themes of the Mansion House showcase, but they are part of the same story: advanced technology is being asked to solve some of the most complex problems of our time, from health outcomes to environmental risk. The portfolio shows a consistent focus on deep science, long-term development and mission-critical use cases, whether that means manufacturing cell therapies, reading DNA in an operating theatre or tracking debris in orbit. What connects these projects is the recognition that the systems on which modern societies depend must be made more robust, more transparent and more trustworthy.
The newsletter also reported on the team behind the portfolio. Amelia Armour, a partner at Amadeus, featured in The Observer on AI security, quoted after her panel at the UK Private Capital Summit on keeping data in Europe and the semiconductor market. Anne Glover, co-founder and chief executive of Amadeus, spoke at the Founders Forum Group VC Forum about how to unlock more pension fund capital for innovation and growth. Both appearances underline a recurring argument: that the challenges facing governments and businesses require collaboration between public and private capital, and between technology companies and the institutions that depend on them. The need for long-term investment is particularly relevant to the defence and resilience sector, where products often take years to develop and require patient capital. The Mansion House showcase, with its virtual currency voting, offered a neat metaphor for the choices facing investors and leaders. Refute’s victory was a signal that information defence is no longer a niche concern, but a core part of national resilience. The Government’s subsequent announcements on the National Centre for Information Defence and the Russia briefings reinforced that message. As the portfolio news shows, the companies working on these problems are not isolated startups; they are building the infrastructure of trust, from quantum error correction to cell therapy manufacturing, from graphene electronics to genomic sequencing. Whether the task is detecting a hostile narrative before it spreads, or ensuring that a supply chain is secure, the common thread is the need to act at speed, with good intelligence, and with the confidence that comes from knowing the systems we rely on are sound. The newsletter invited readers to subscribe for future updates, but the substance of this issue was clear: in a world where trust takes years to earn and minutes to weaken, protecting it has become the defining challenge of the decade. The combination of a counter-disinformation winner at Mansion House and a new government centre for information defence suggests that the message is finally being heard.