Every day, conversations unfold across social media and websites, and a single seemingly insignificant post—AI-generated misinformation, hate speech, or a damaging rumor—can snowball into a public controversy. Gudea, a startup that describes itself as the “storm tracker for the internet,” uses AI to help organizations spot trouble online before it turns into a crisis. The company pitched its mission on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where CEO and founder Keith Presley made the case that companies need a proactive approach to protecting their reputations.

Where traditional social listening platforms track metrics such as mentions, hashtags, and impressions, Gudea says it shows who is driving a conversation, how information is moving, how quickly a story is gaining traction, and where it could be headed. 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. The intent is not merely to tell a company that mentions are rising, but to provide the context behind that growth so decision-makers can determine how and whether to respond. Presley criticized legacy tools, saying chief communications officers and chief media or marketing officers are using tools that were only ever designed to count hashtags and impressions.

Gudea was founded in 2023 by Presley, Jonathan Sperber, and James Thomin. Presley has more than 15 years spanning political campaigns and 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, the CTO, holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and has spent roughly two decades working in AI and machine learning. Presley described the path to founding the company as unusual: “We’re one of those weird startups where I never wanted to do a company.” The work began with the George Washington Initiative, a nonprofit established after the 2020 election, which adapted strategies and tactics used by the intelligence community overseas to disrupt online networks tied to groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. Applying those to domestic information campaigns, the team aimed to identify the online environments where campaigns take shape and disrupt the pathways that let narratives reach wider audiences. Existing tools did not show how information actually moved across people, groups, and platforms, and that gap became the opening for Gudea.

Three years after founding, Gudea has nearly 40 clients. According to Presley, they include 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, he says the need for the technology has grown: AI tools have lowered the cost and effort required to generate content and coordinate campaigns, so what once required a larger organization can increasingly be done by a single person with a laptop. Presley contrasted the change over time: “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. Now it’s probably nine out of ten things that we look at have this inauthentic activity.”

Looking ahead, Gudea plans to expand its ability to understand where narratives originate and how they spread. A major upcoming initiative is geolocation for narratives, slated for next year, which would allow users to 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, such as running an advertising campaign through Gudea’s AI model before launch to gauge whether the strategy is likely to produce a negative outcome. Last week, Gudea announced $7 million in seed funding in a round co-led by Mudita Venture Partners and Silicon Road Ventures, bringing total funding to approximately $15 million.