Every day, conversations unfold on social media and websites around the world. Even a seemingly insignificant post, such as AI-generated misinformation, hate speech, or harmful rumors, can quickly snowball into a major social controversy.
Gudea is a company that tracks how stories and rumors spread online and calls itself the “storm tracker of the Internet.” We use AI to help organizations discover online problems before they become a crisis.
Unlike traditional social listening platforms that only track metrics like mentions, hashtags, and impressions, Gudea aims to show organizations who is driving the conversation, how information is moving, how quickly a story is gaining traction, and where that story is heading. Rather than simply aggregating posts, its AI analyzes behaviors, relationships, and information channels across more than 500 mainstream and fringe websites and platforms, including X, Reddit, and TikTok.
Rather than simply telling businesses that mentions are increasing, Gudea aims to provide the context behind that growth so decision makers can decide how and whether to respond.
Gudea pitched its mission on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on Wednesday afternoon, arguing that companies need to take a more proactive approach to protecting their reputations.
“These big industries don’t understand that there are things they can do proactively to protect their reputations and brands,” said CEO and founder Keith Presley. “A lot of chief communications officers, chief media officers, and marketing officers are using traditional tools to understand what’s going on. Those tools were just designed to tell you the number of hashtags and the number of impressions.”
Gudea was founded in 2023 by Presley, Jonathan Sperber, and James Thomin. Pressley has more than 15 years of experience ranging from political campaigns to defense, including building the infrastructure for Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign. Sperber, the company’s chief strategy officer, has a background in disinformation research. Thomin, Gudea’s CTO, holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and has been working in AI and machine learning research for almost 20 years.
Pressley said the company’s path to becoming a startup was unusual.
“We’re one of those weird start-up companies where I didn’t want to build a company,” he said.
The team began with the George Washington Initiative, a nonprofit formed after the 2020 election. The organization adopted strategies and tactics that foreign intelligence agencies have used to disrupt online networks tied to groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS. It was applied to a national information campaign.
The goal was to identify the online environments in which information campaigns take shape and disrupt the channels by which their stories reach wider audiences.
However, the team realized that existing tools did not show how information actually moves between people, groups, and platforms. That gap became Gudea’s opening.
Three years after its founding, Gudea has nearly 40 customers. Pressley said the company’s customer base includes Fortune 50 carriers, Fortune 50 retailers, “one of the largest AI labs in the world, one of the largest bands in the world,” public affairs and crisis liaison agencies, and government agencies.
With the rise of generative AI, Pressley believes Gudea’s technology will become increasingly necessary as the company looks to expand its customer base.
AI tools have significantly reduced the cost and effort required to generate content and coordinate online campaigns. What once required a large organization can now be accomplished by a single person with a laptop and access to the appropriate software.
“When we first started in 2021 and then as a company in 2023, probably one out of every four things we looked at, we found there was fraudulent activity going on around it,” Pressley said. “Right now, probably nine out of 10 things we look at include this type of illicit activity.”
Gudea plans to look even further ahead, expanding its ability to understand where stories come from and how they spread. One of our key future efforts will be geolocation of narratives. The technology, which will be introduced next year, is intended to allow users to pinpoint where conversations are occurring with much greater accuracy, down to the city block level, Pressley said.
The company also wants to give customers access to the tools behind the analytics. For example, businesses can ultimately run their advertising campaigns through Gudea’s AI models before launching them and get a better idea of whether their strategies are likely to produce negative results.
Gudea announced last week that it had raised $7 million in seed funding in a round co-led by Mudita Venture Partners and Silicon Road Ventures. This investment brings the startup’s total funding to approximately $15 million.
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