Gudea raises $15M to help companies detect social media crises before they escalate
Gudea’s $7 million seed round, co-led by Mudita Venture Partners and Silicon Road Ventures, brings total funding to about $15 million. Its AI maps behavior and information pathways across 500+ sites, including X, Reddit and TikTok.
Gudea, a startup that tracks how stories and rumors spread online, has raised $7 million in seed funding as it looks to expand its AI-powered platform for spotting emerging social media crises. The round, co-led by Mudita Venture Partners and Silicon Road Ventures, brings the company’s total funding to approximately $15 million. The announcement came last week, ahead of the company’s appearance at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in October 2026.
Founded in 2023 by CEO Keith Presley, Chief Strategy Officer Jonathan Sperber, and CTO James Thomin, Gudea describes itself as a “storm tracker for the internet.” Rather than measuring mentions, hashtags, and impressions like traditional social listening tools, the platform 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 company traces its origins to the George Washington Initiative, a nonprofit formed after the 2020 election that applied intelligence-community tactics to domestic information campaigns. When the team found that existing tools failed to show how information actually moved across people, groups, and platforms, they built Gudea to fill that gap.
Presley said the threat landscape has shifted sharply since the company’s early days. “When we first started in 2021, we maybe saw one out of four things we looked at have inauthentic activity around it,” he said. “Now it’s probably nine out of ten things.” He attributed the change largely to generative AI tools, which have lowered the cost and effort required to produce and coordinate online content campaigns.
Gudea currently serves nearly 40 clients, including a Fortune 50 telecommunications company, a Fortune 50 retailer, a major AI lab, crisis communications agencies, and government agencies. The company plans to introduce narrative geolocation technology next year, which it says could pinpoint where conversations are happening down to the city-block level.