Gudea raises $7 million seed for online crisis detection

Gudea's path to this seed round runs through the George Washington Initiative, a nonprofit set up after the 2020 election. That group adapted tactics the intelligence community had used overseas to disrupt online networks tied to groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS and applied them to domestic information campaigns. The team found that existing tools did not show how information actually moved across people, groups and platforms, and that gap became the opening for Gudea, which was founded in 2023.

Gudea says its AI analyzes behavior, relationships and the pathways information travels across more than 500 mainstream and fringe websites and platforms, including X, Reddit and TikTok — a different approach from traditional social listening platforms that track mentions, hashtags and impressions. The company pitched that mission on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Three years after its founding, Gudea has nearly 40 clients, a base Presley says 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.

Presley ties the company's pitch to the rise of generative AI, which he says has lowered the cost and effort of generating content and coordinating online campaigns. He said that when the team started in 2021, and then as a company in 2023, perhaps one out of four things it looked at had inauthentic activity around it, whereas now it is probably nine out of ten. Beyond the geolocation plan, Gudea also wants to give customers greater access to the tools behind its analysis, with the idea that a company could eventually run an advertising campaign through Gudea's AI model before launching it.