Gudea leverages AI to help organizations prevent social media crises before they erupt

“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. Presley brings more than 15 years of experience 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, Gudea’s CTO, holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and has spent roughly two decades working in AI and machine learning.

Presley called the company’s path to becoming a startup unusual.

“We’re one of those weird startups where I never wanted to do a company,” he said.

The team began with the George Washington Initiative, a nonprofit established after the 2020 election. The organization adapted strategies and tactics that the intelligence community has used overseas to disrupt online networks tied to groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. It applied them to domestic information campaigns.

The goal was to identify the online environments where information campaigns were taking shape and disrupt the pathways that allowed those narratives to reach wider audiences.

However, the team found that existing tools didn’t show how information was actually moving across people, groups and platforms. That gap became the opening 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 that the need for Gudea’s technology has only grown, as the company looks to expand its customer base.

AI tools have dramatically lowered the cost and effort required to generate content and coordinate online campaigns. What once required a larger organization can increasingly be carried out 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.”

Looking further ahead, Gudea plans to expand its ability to understand where narratives originate and how they spread. One major upcoming initiative is geolocation for narratives. Slated 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 explains.

The company also wants to give customers greater access to the tools behind its analysis. For example, a company could eventually run an advertising campaign through Gudea’s AI model before launching it and get a better idea 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.