Every single day, millions of conversations take place across social media platforms and websites globally. A post that might seem trivial at first glance—whether it contains AI-generated misinformation, hate speech, or a harmful rumor—can rapidly escalate into a major public controversy. Gudea, a company that monitors how stories and rumors propagate online and refers to itself as the "storm tracker for the internet," is leveraging AI to help organizations detect emerging problems online before they escalate into full-blown crises.

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Traditional social listening platforms focus only on metrics like mentions, hashtags, and impressions. Gudea takes a different approach. It aims to reveal to organizations who is fueling a conversation, how information is spreading, how rapidly a story is gaining momentum, and where it might be heading. Rather than merely counting posts, its AI examines behavior, relationships, and the routes through which information flows across more than 500 mainstream and fringe websites and platforms, including X, Reddit, and TikTok. Instead of just alerting a company that mentions are increasing, Gudea seeks to provide the context behind that increase 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," said CEO and founder Keith Presley. "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 established in 2023 by Presley, Jonathan Sperber, and James Thomin. Presley has over 15 years of experience in political campaigns and defense, including building infrastructure for Andrew Yang's presidential campaign. Sperber, the company's chief strategy officer, comes from a background in disinformation research. Thomin, Gudea's CTO, earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and has spent about two decades in AI and machine learning.

Presley described the company's journey to becoming a startup as unconventional. "We're one of those weird startups where I never wanted to do a company," he said. The team started with the George Washington Initiative, a nonprofit founded after the 2020 election. The organization took strategies and tactics that the intelligence community had used overseas to disrupt online networks connected to groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS and applied them to domestic information campaigns. The objective was to identify the online environments where information campaigns were developing and disrupt the pathways that enabled those narratives to reach broader audiences. However, the team discovered that existing tools didn't reveal how information was actually moving across people, groups, and platforms. That gap became the opportunity for Gudea.

Three years after its founding, Gudea has nearly 40 clients. According to Presley, its customer 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. With the rise of generative AI, Presley believes the need for Gudea's technology has only intensified as the company looks to expand its customer base. AI tools have dramatically reduced the cost and effort required to generate content and coordinate online campaigns. What once demanded a larger organization can increasingly be accomplished 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," Presley said. "Now it's probably nine out of ten things that we look at have this inauthentic activity."

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Looking ahead, Gudea plans to expand its ability to understand where narratives originate and how they spread. One major upcoming initiative is geolocation for narratives. Scheduled for next year, the technology is intended to allow users to identify where conversations are happening with far greater precision, down to the city-block level, Presley explained. The company also wants to give customers greater access to the tools behind its analysis. For instance, a company could eventually run an advertising campaign through Gudea's AI model before launching it and get a better sense of whether the strategy is likely to produce a negative outcome or not.

Last week, Gudea announced that 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.