Gudea uses AI to trace how rumors travel online, aiming to help organizations spot trouble before it becomes a crisis. The company says its analysis covers behavior, relationships, and information flows on more than 500 mainstream and fringe websites and platforms, including X, Reddit, and TikTok.
AI-generated misinformation, hate speech, or a damaging rumor in an apparently minor post can grow into a public controversy. Gudea describes itself as the “storm tracker for the internet” and aims to establish who’s shaping a conversation, how information reaches others, how fast a story is spreading, and where it might go next.
Traditional social listening tools count mentions, hashtags, and impressions. Gudea says its goal is to account for what’s happening beneath those numbers. Instead of merely flagging an increase in posts, it seeks to supply the context decision-makers need to choose whether to respond and, if so, how.
On Wednesday afternoon, the company argued that businesses should act sooner to protect their reputations during its appearance on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.
“These big industries don’t understand that there are things they can do proactively to defend their reputation and their brand,” CEO and founder Keith Presley said. “A lot of the chief communications officers and chief media or marketing officers, they’re using legacy tools to try to figure out what’s happening. Those tools were only ever designed to tell you the number of hashtags or number of impressions.”
Gudea now has nearly 40 clients, three years after it was founded. Presley says its customers include a Fortune 50 telecommunications company, a Fortune 50 retailer, “one of the world’s largest AI labs, one of the world’s largest bands,” public relations and crisis communications agencies, and government agencies.
A seed investment of $7 million, announced by Gudea last week, brings the company’s total funding to approximately $15 million. Mudita Venture Partners and Silicon Road Ventures co-led the round.
Presley founded Gudea with Jonathan Sperber and James Thomin in 2023. Their earlier work was at the George Washington Initiative, a nonprofit established after the 2020 election. For Presley, moving from that effort into running a company wasn’t a typical route to a startup.
“We’re one of those weird startups where I never wanted to do a company,” Presley said.
The nonprofit brought methods from the intelligence community to domestic information campaigns. Overseas, those strategies and tactics had helped disrupt online networks associated with groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. The team’s objective was to find the online spaces in which campaigns were developing, then interrupt the routes carrying their narratives to larger audiences.
Existing tools, however, couldn’t show the team how information passed between people, groups, and platforms. Gudea grew out of the need to fill that gap.
Each founder brings a different professional background. Presley’s more than 15 years in political campaigns and defense include building infrastructure for Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign. Sperber, the chief strategy officer, previously worked in disinformation research. CTO Thomin has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, along with roughly two decades of work in AI and machine learning.
As Gudea works to attract more customers, Presley believes generative AI has made its technology more necessary. AI tools have cut the expense and effort involved in creating content and coordinating online campaigns. Increasingly, a person with a laptop and suitable software can do work that previously needed a larger organization.
“When we first started in 2021, and then as a company in 2023, we maybe saw one out of four things we looked at have inauthentic activity around it,” Presley said. “Now it’s probably nine out of ten things that we look at have this inauthentic activity.”
Plans for Gudea include building a clearer picture of where narratives begin and how they travel. Among those plans is narrative geolocation, due next year. According to Presley, it’s intended to locate conversations much more precisely, down to a city block.
The company also plans to open up more of its analytical tools to customers. For example, a business might eventually put an advertising campaign through Gudea’s AI model ahead of its launch to assess whether the strategy is likely to lead to a negative outcome. Gudea presents that use as something that could become possible, rather than an option customers can use today.
