Gudea pitches AI 'storm tracker' to spot social media crises before they erupt

The company tracks how stories and rumors move across more than 500 mainstream and fringe websites and platforms, including X, Reddit and TikTok. Unlike traditional social listening tools that count mentions, hashtags and impressions, Gudea says its models analyze behavior, relationships and the pathways information travels along, identifying who is driving a conversation, how fast a story is gaining traction and where it may head next. The stated aim is to give decision-makers the context behind a rise in mentions rather than the bare number.

"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 on stage. He said chief communications officers and chief media or marketing officers often rely on legacy tools "only ever designed to tell you the number of hashtags or number of impressions."

Gudea was founded in 2023 by Presley, Jonathan Sperber and James Thomin. Presley has more than 15 years of experience spanning political campaigns and defense, including building infrastructure for Andrew Yang's presidential campaign. Sperber, the chief strategy officer, has a background in disinformation research, and CTO Thomin holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and has spent about two decades working in AI and machine learning.

Presley described the company's path as unusual, saying he had never wanted to run a company. The team's work began with the George Washington Initiative, a nonprofit established after the 2020 election that adapted strategies and tactics the intelligence community used overseas to disrupt online networks tied to groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, and applied them to domestic information campaigns. The goal was to identify the online environments where information campaigns were taking shape and disrupt the pathways that let those narratives reach wider audiences. Existing tools, the team found, did not show how information actually moved across people, groups and platforms, and that gap became Gudea's opening.

According to TechCrunch's account of the pitch, the client base 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," public relations and crisis communications agencies, and government agencies.

Presley said generative AI has increased the need for that kind of monitoring. Content generation and the coordination of online campaigns that once required a larger organization can increasingly be carried out by a single person with a laptop and access to 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," he said. "Now it's probably nine out of ten things that we look at have this inauthentic activity."

Gudea plans to broaden its ability to trace where narratives originate and how they spread. A geolocation feature for narratives is slated for next year, which Presley said would let users identify where conversations are happening with far greater precision, down to the city-block level. The company also wants to give customers greater access to the tools behind its analysis; a company could, for example, run an advertising campaign through Gudea's AI model before launching it and get a better idea of whether the strategy is likely to produce a negative outcome.

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, bringing the startup's total funding to approximately $15 million.

Editor's Summary

Gudea, founded in 2023, sells AI analysis of how narratives spread across more than 500 platforms and counts corporate, agency and government clients. The startup pitched at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 with nearly 40 customers and $7 million in new seed funding, and plans to add narrative geolocation next year.