Gudea, a startup using AI to track how stories and rumors spread online, pitched its platform on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, shortly after securing $7 million in seed funding co-led by Mudita Venture Partners and Silicon Road Ventures. The round brings its total funding to about $15 million.
Unlike traditional social listening tools that count mentions and impressions, Gudea’s AI analyzes behavior, relationships and information pathways across more than 500 mainstream and fringe platforms, including X, Reddit and TikTok, to show who is driving a conversation and where it may be headed.
CEO and founder Keith Presley, who co-founded the company in 2023 with chief strategy officer Jonathan Sperber and CTO James Thomin, said many communications leaders still rely on legacy tools. He added that generative AI has sharply increased inauthentic activity, which the company now sees in roughly nine out of 10 cases it examines, up from about one in four when it began.
Gudea has nearly 40 clients, including a Fortune 50 telecoms company and one of the world’s largest AI labs. It plans to add narrative geolocation down to the city-block level next year and let customers test campaigns through its AI model before release.
