A Yorkshire tech firm which recently lost contracts with TikTok and Meta has been sold in a pre-pack administration deal.
Logically, based in Brighouse, West Yorkshire, was founded in 2017 to combat fake news via AI-based fact-checking technology in the wake of the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s first election as US President.
Founder Lyric Jain (pictured), then aged 21 and completing his engineering studies at Cambridge University, told BusinessCloud in early 2018 that platforms such as Facebook incentivise clickbait material, which is partly what has led to the rise of fake news.
Also citing Russian political motivations around the Brexit debate and US election, he told us: “A large subset of fake news is just propaganda but there’s also a large subset which is opportunistic.
“If someone wants to make money, they don’t care about whether a report is fake and which political spectrum it promotes – they just want the clickbait.
“There needs to be some change in the way that these platforms [such as Facebook] are monetised. Having this clickbait material incentivised isn’t healthy for them.”
Echo chamber
Jain, who was brought up in India before moving to the UK when he was 11, started his first business at the age of just 16 when he designed and later developed the ABS Secure Lock, now seen as the industry benchmark for door locks.
Telling us that his original motivation for building Logically was witnessing the ‘echo chamber’ effect during the Brexit debate, he designed the machine-learning algorithm with the aid of faculty advisers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States whilst studying at the world-renowned college for a year.
Indeed Logically’s board of advisers included alumni from both MIT and Cambridge Uni. Jain also saw potential in building a trusted news aggregator as well as an indicator of factual accuracy, claiming: “It could be the future of journalism.”
He would go on to raise almost £30m as Logically became one of the country’s largest fact-checking companies.
Expanding influence
In 2021 Logically announced official fact-checking partnerships in the UK with major social media platforms TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, while it accelerated its operations in the US with its first senior hires, including former Department of Homeland Security senior official, Brian Murphy.
In India it launched Logically Health; a multi-pronged initiative designed to help public and private sector healthcare organizations better identify and manage harmful health misinformation.
Logically conducted a number of high-profile and impactful investigations, including unearthing anti-vaccination campaigns targeting schoolchildren and US citizens during COVID. It also published research into how the climate change misinformation landscape had been impacted by COVID-related conspiracies. Sir Hossein Yassaie would also join as chair of its board.
Last year it acquired Barcelona-based AI company Insikt AI to strengthen its research and development capabilities, while as recently as April 2025 it announced a partnership with data and AI giant Databricks to ‘redefine how governments, enterprises, and institutions anticipate and respond to online narrative risks’.
Changing narrative
Logically’s narrative had also changed: its website now talks about its mission to ‘detect risks, predict trends, and surface the insights that matter most – before they become crises or lost opportunities’.
The shift from protecting citizens through fact-checking to protecting governments and corporations against reputational damage followed the move by social media companies away from combating misinformation and towards ‘freedom of speech’ as Trump returned to the White House.
Multi-million-pound verification contracts with the likes of Meta and TikTok were stopped for “commercial reasons”, although reports suggest the true motivation lies deeper.
Meta has committed to abandoning work with independent fact-checkers – which CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims have become “too politically biased” – in favour of community checkers.
Logically, a regular on our MediaTech 50 rankings – including this year – had already laid off dozens of employees prior to the administration news in recent days.
What’s next?
So what now for Logically?
Acquirer Kreatur Ltd, who has agreed a pre-pack deal with administrators, is run by a former director and early investor in Logically, Ashwin Kumaraswamy.
It has acquired Logically’s ‘core technology, brand and key assets’ and ‘ensured continuity for all customers… preserving over 50 full-time roles’.
A source told the Times of India: “Fact-checking with platforms was not an attractive business. Logically was gradually winding up that side of the business to focus on corporate and government customers for information advantage and providing competitive intelligence.”