Fabula was co-founded on 20 April 2018 by Imperial College Professor Michael Bronstein, PhD student Federico Monti, entrepreneur Ernesto Schmitt and Damon Mannion.^[5][6][4] Bronstein was chair in machine learning and pattern recognition at Imperial College, London at the time, while Monti was at the University of Lugano, Switzerland. Later that year, the company raised an undisclosed sum from various individual angel investors.^[7]

The company was founded to solve the problem of online disinformation, or 'fake news' by looking at how it spreads on social networks rather than focusing on the content itself, as some other approaches take.^[8][9] It achieved this through its use of patented algorithms that use the emergent field of "Geometric Deep Learning" to detect online disinformation, employing geometric graph deep learning to detect network manipulation.^[10]

By February 2019, Fabula AI was "able to identify 93 per cent of ‘fake news’ within hours of dissemination". This 93% accuracy was achieved within a few hours of the news first appearing.^[11][12]

On 3 June 2019, Twitter announced its acquisition of Fabula AI for an undisclosed sum, likely to tackle disinformation it was receiving increasing political pressure for.^{[13][14][15][16][17][18]}

"Our acquisition of Fabula builds on other investments we’ve made in machine learning, for example, Madbits in 2014, Whetlab in 2015 and Magic Pony in 2016. Fabula's team will be joining the Twitter Cortex team of ML engineers, data scientists, and researchers. Cortex is the central ML org at Twitter with the goal to advance machine learning inside & outside Twitter."

— Parag Agrawal, Twitter CTO.^[19][20]