Gudea Uses AI to Help Organizations Prevent Social Media Crises Before They Happen
Every day, conversations on social media and websites around the world become visible. A seemingly minor post, whether it contains AI-generated misinformation, hate speech, or a damaging rumor, can quickly grow into a major public controversy. Gudea, a company that tracks how online stories and rumors spread and calls itself a "storm tracker for the internet," […]
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Every day, conversations unfold on social media and websites around the world. A seemingly inconsequential post—whether it contains AI-generated misinformation, hate speech, or a malicious rumor—can quickly escalate into a larger public controversy.
Gudea, a company that tracks how stories and rumors spread online and describes itself as a "storm tracker for the Internet," uses artificial intelligence to help organizations identify online problems before they become a crisis.
Unlike traditional social listening platforms, which only track metrics like mentions, hashtags, and impressions, Gudea's goal is to show organizations who's driving the conversation, how information is moving, how fast the story is getting attention, and where it can be directed. Rather than simply summarizing posts, its AI analyzes behavior, relationships, and the paths through which information travels across more than 500 mainstream and fringe websites and platforms, including X, Reddit, and TikTok.
Rather than telling a company that mentions are growing, Gudea's goal is to lay the groundwork for that growth so that decision makers can determine how and to respond to it.
Gudea presented its mission Wednesday afternoon on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where the company argued that companies need to take a more proactive approach to protecting their reputations.
Keith Presley, CEO and founder of the company, said: "These big industries don't know that there are things they can do to actively defend their reputation and brand. "A lot of CCOs and CMOs or CMOs are using old tools to understand what's going on. These tools are only designed to tell you the number of hashtags or the number of impressions."
Gudea was founded in 2023 by Presley, Jonathan Sperber and James Tumin. Presley brings more than 15 years of experience in political and advocacy campaigns, including building the infrastructure for Andrew Young's presidential campaign. Sperber, the company's chief strategy officer, has a background in disinformation research. Tumin, Gudea's CTO, holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and has worked in artificial intelligence and machine learning for nearly two decades.
Presley called the company's path to becoming a startup unusual.
"We're one of those weird startups that I never wanted to own," he says.
The team started with the George Washington Initiative, a non-profit organization founded after the 2020 election. The organization has adapted strategies and tactics used by the intelligence community abroad to disrupt online networks associated with groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS. He used them in internal information campaigns.
The goal was to identify the online environments where information campaigns were taking shape and disrupting the pathways that allowed those narratives to reach a wider audience.
However, the team realized that existing tools did not show how information moves between people, groups and platforms. This gap became an opening for Gudea.
Three years after its establishment, Gudea has nearly 40 customers. According to Presley, its client base includes a Fortune 50 telecommunications company, a Fortune 50 retailer, "one of the largest artificial intelligence labs, one of the largest music groups in the world," public relations and crisis communications agencies, and government agencies.
With the advent of generative artificial intelligence, Presley believes the need for Gudea's technology has only increased as the company looks to expand its customer base.
Artificial intelligence tools have significantly reduced the cost and effort required to produce content and coordinate online campaigns. What once required a larger organization can increasingly be done by one person with a laptop and access to the right software.
"When we first started in 2021 and then as a company in 2023, maybe one out of every four cases we looked at had non-core activity," Presley said. "Now probably 9 out of 10 cases that we look at have this non-genuine activity."
Looking further into the future, Gudea plans to expand its ability to understand where narratives originate and how they spread. One important future initiative is geolocation for narratives. Planned for next year, Steprisley explains that the technology will allow users to pinpoint where conversations are taking place much more precisely, down to the city block level.
The company also wants to give customers more access to the tools behind its analytics. For example, a company can finally run an ad campaign through Gudea's AI model before launching it and get a better idea of whether the strategy is likely to backfire.
Last week, Gudea announced that it had raised $7 million in seed funding in a round led by Mudita Venture Partners and Silicon Road Ventures. This investment brings the total budget of the startup to about 15 million dollars.
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Lauren covers media, streaming, apps and platforms at TechCrunch.
You can contact or confirm Lauren by emailing [email protected] or by texting laurenforris22.25 on Signal.
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