Gudea wants companies to see a rumor coming before it becomes a headline. The startup, which describes itself as the “storm tracker for the internet,” uses artificial intelligence to map how stories spread online and to flag posts that could snowball into larger controversies. It made its pitch Wednesday afternoon on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.
What does Gudea's AI do?
The company says it goes well beyond the dashboards most marketing and communications teams rely on. Traditional social listening platforms track mentions, hashtags and impressions. Gudea says its AI looks at behavior, relationships and the paths information takes across more than 500 mainstream and fringe websites and platforms, including X, Reddit and TikTok. The goal is to show who is pushing a conversation, how fast a story is gaining ground and where it might be headed.
How is Gudea different from social listening tools?
That difference matters, according to CEO and founder Keith Presley. Rising mention counts alone do not tell a company whether it should respond, or how. Gudea aims to supply the context behind the growth so executives can make that call.
“These big industries don’t understand that there are things they can do proactively to defend their reputation and their brand,” 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.”
Who founded Gudea and what is their background?
Gudea was founded in 2023 by Presley, Jonathan Sperber and James Thomin. Presley brings more than 15 years of experience spanning political campaigns and defense, including work building the infrastructure for Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign. Sperber, the company’s chief strategy officer, has a background in disinformation research. Thomin, the CTO, holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and has spent roughly two decades working in AI and machine learning.
Presley said the company’s origins are unusual for a startup. “We’re one of those weird startups where I never wanted to do a company,” he said.
The team started at the George Washington Initiative, a nonprofit established after the 2020 election. The group adapted strategies and tactics the intelligence community has used overseas to disrupt online networks tied to groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, and applied them to domestic information campaigns. The aim was to find the online spaces where those campaigns were forming and cut off the routes that let their narratives reach wider audiences.
The team concluded that existing tools could not show how information moved across people, groups and platforms. That gap became the opening for Gudea.
Three years after its founding, the company has nearly 40 clients. Presley said they 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.
Presley argues that generative AI has increased the need for the company’s work. Tools that make it cheap and fast to produce content and coordinate online campaigns mean that activity once requiring a large organization can now be run by one person with a laptop and the right software.
He described the change in his own data. “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.”
The company has several product plans. The most significant is geolocation for narratives, slated for next year. Presley said the feature is meant to let users pinpoint where conversations are happening with far greater precision, down to the city-block level.
Gudea also wants to give customers more direct access to the tools behind its analysis. One example it cited: a company could run an advertising campaign through Gudea’s AI model before launching it, to get a sense of whether the strategy is likely to backfire.
Last week, Gudea announced it had raised $7 million in seed funding in a round co-led by Mudita Venture Partners and Silicon Road Ventures. The investment brings the startup’s total funding to approximately $15 million.
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