Amil Khan

Amil Khan is the co-founder and CEO of Valent, the London-based AI company he established in 2020 to address what he saw as a structural gap in how institutions defend themselves against coordinated information threats. Born and raised in Britain, Khan is an Arabic and Farsi speaker who began his career in journalism shortly after graduating, covering breaking news and conducting investigative documentaries across the Middle East, Iraq, Sudan, and Africa as a correspondent for Reuters and a filmmaker for the BBC. His decade on the frontlines of some of the most contested information environments in the world proved formative — as did his growing conviction that journalism alone was insufficient to address what was happening to information itself.

Khan left journalism around 2008 to move into consulting, working with political parties, civil society organisations, non-profits, and ultimately the UK government. From 2013, he served as Senior Communications Advisor at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and from 2015 to 2020 as Senior Advisor at the UK Government’s Stabilisation Unit, where he led research into disinformation practices at a time when the field was still being defined. He was simultaneously an Associate Fellow at Chatham House, conducting research on peer-to-peer digital communications and their effects on political dynamics in South Asia and the Middle East. Through these roles, he witnessed — and helped the government begin to understand — how coordinated networks of fake accounts and bot-driven operations were being used to manipulate public discourse at scale.

Valent was founded on the observation that fact-checking, the dominant response to disinformation, addresses content rather than the infrastructure of manipulation. The company’s core product, Ariadne, is a multi-agent AI system designed to map how bad actors construct and operate information influence campaigns, identify patterns of inauthentic behaviour, and provide governments and financial institutions with proactive response options. The system has been deployed against state-sponsored influence operations in Sudan, 5G conspiracy networks in the UK, and stock market manipulation attempts in financial services.

In January 2026, Valent raised £1.1 million in funding led by the Bayes Entrepreneurship Fund, with angel participation including Carsten Kraus, German Angel Investor of the Year 2024. Khan has been described by peers as one of the UK’s foremost practitioners at the intersection of information security, journalism, and geopolitics.