Gudea is a startup that applies artificial intelligence to detect early signs of brewing online crises — from AI-generated misinformation to hate speech and damaging rumors. The company describes itself as a “storm tracker for the internet” and aims to give organizations contextual, actionable insight into how narratives are forming and spreading before they escalate into broader controversies.
How it differs from traditional listening tools
Unlike conventional social listening platforms that mainly report metrics such as mention counts, hashtags and impressions, Gudea analyzes behavior, relationships and the pathways information travels. Its system monitors more than 500 mainstream and fringe websites and platforms, including X, Reddit and TikTok. Instead of merely flagging that mentions are rising, the product seeks to explain who is driving a conversation, how information is moving, how quickly it is gaining traction and where it might go next.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 presentation
Gudea presented its mission on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, arguing that companies need to adopt more proactive reputation protection strategies. Keith Presley, CEO and founder of Gudea, said: “These big industries don’t understand that there are things they can do proactively to defend their reputation and their brand. 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.”
Founders and background
Gudea was founded in 2023 by Keith Presley, Jonathan Sperber and James Thomin. Presley has more than 15 years of experience across political campaigns and defense, and helped build infrastructure for Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign. Jonathan Sperber, the company’s chief strategy officer, has a background in disinformation research. James Thomin, Gudea’s chief technology officer, holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and has spent nearly two decades working in AI and machine learning.
The team’s origins are somewhat unconventional: they started from the George Washington Initiative, a nonprofit formed after the 2020 election that adapted intelligence-community tactics used overseas to disrupt online networks tied to groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, and applied those approaches to domestic information campaigns. That work exposed a gap: existing tools did not reveal how information actually moved across people, groups and platforms — a gap Gudea set out to fill.
Customers and use cases
Three years after its founding, Gudea has nearly 40 clients. According to Presley, the customer roster includes a Fortune 50 telecommunications company, a Fortune 50 retailer, “one of the world’s largest AI labs, one of the world’s largest bands,” as well as public relations and crisis communications agencies and government bodies.
Presley argues the need for Gudea’s technology has increased with the rise of generative AI, which has dramatically lowered the cost and effort required to produce content and coordinate online campaigns. Tasks that once required larger organizations can increasingly be executed by a single person with a laptop and the right software. “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.”
Roadmap and product development
Gudea plans to deepen its ability to trace where narratives originate and how they spread. A major upcoming feature planned for next year is geolocation for narratives: Presley says this will let users identify where conversations are occurring with much greater precision, down to the city-block level. The company also intends to provide customers with greater access to the tools behind its analysis — for example, allowing a client to run a planned advertising campaign through Gudea’s AI model in advance to estimate whether the campaign is likely to generate negative outcomes.
Funding
Last week Gudea announced a $7 million seed round co-led by Mudita Venture Partners and Silicon Road Ventures. That investment brings the startup’s total funding to approximately $15 million.
Why it matters
Rapidly produced and coordinated online content poses reputational and operational risks for companies, institutions and communities. Tools that go beyond raw metrics to expose the mechanics of narrative spread can help decision-makers respond more proactively and thoughtfully to emerging threats.
