Daily conversations across social media and websites can escalate quickly, with a seemingly insignificant post involving misinformation, hate speech, or damaging rumors snowballing into a major public controversy.
Gudea, a company describing itself as the “storm tracker for the internet,” is using AI to help organizations spot brewing trouble online before it turns into a full-blown crisis.
Unlike traditional social listening platforms that only track metrics like mentions and impressions, Gudea aims to show organizations who is driving a conversation, how information is moving, and where a story is heading. Its AI analyzes behavior, relationships, and the pathways through which information travels across more than 500 mainstream and fringe websites and platforms, including X, Reddit, and TikTok.
Instead of simply alerting a company that mentions are rising, Gudea provides the context behind that growth so decision-makers can determine how and whether to respond.
“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. “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.”
Gudea was founded in 2023 by Presley, Jonathan Sperber, and James Thomin. The team previously worked on the George Washington Initiative, a nonprofit that adapted intelligence tactics used overseas to disrupt online networks tied to groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS for domestic information campaigns.
Presley called the company’s path unusual, noting that the team found existing tools did not show how information was actually moving across people and platforms. Now serving nearly 40 clients, the startup's customer base includes a Fortune 50 telecommunications company, a Fortune 50 retailer, a global AI lab, and government agencies.
With the rise of generative AI, Presley believes the need for Gudea’s technology has grown. AI tools have lowered the cost of generating content and coordinating campaigns, meaning inauthentic activity is now found in roughly nine out of ten instances, up from one in four when the company started in 2021.
Looking ahead, Gudea plans to expand its ability to understand narrative origins and aims to offer users city-block level geolocation for conversations next year. The company also wants to allow customers to run simulations through its AI models to predict campaign outcomes.
Last week, Gudea announced it had raised $7 million in seed funding, bringing its total capital to approximately $15 million.
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