Gudea uses AI to spot network crises before they blow up

Gudea took the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 yesterday with a pitch that distinguishes it from conventional social-listening tools. Instead of counting mentions, hashtags and impressions, the platform maps the social graph — who is driving a conversation, how information moves between communities, how fast a narrative is accelerating and where it might go next. The system scans more than 500 sites and platforms, from X and Reddit to TikTok and fringe forums, analyzing behavioral patterns and connections rather than surfacing a dashboard of surface-level metrics.

The company was founded in 2023 by Keith Presley, Jonathan Sperber and James Thomin, a trio with an unusual pedigree for a startup. Presley built the digital infrastructure for Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign and spent 15 years in political campaigns and security. Sperber comes from disinformation research. Thomin, the CTO, holds a Ph.D in chemical engineering and has two decades in AI and machine learning. Presley said they “never wanted to start a company”; the product emerged from the George Washington Initiative, a nonprofit formed after the 2020 election that adapted intelligence tactics used against al-Qaeda and ISIS to detect domestic information campaigns. The gap they found — no tool showed how narratives move across people, groups and platforms — became Gudea’s foundation.

Three years in, the company reports close to 40 paying customers. According to Presley, the roster includes a Fortune 50 telecom and a Fortune 50 retailer, “one of the world’s largest AI labs,” “one of the world’s largest bands,” PR and crisis-management agencies, and government bodies. The Disrupt pitch centered on large industries’ need to shift from reactive to proactive reputation defense, while communications and marketing leaders still rely on tools built to measure reach, not to understand dynamics.

The surge in generative AI capabilities plays into Gudea’s hands. Presley argues that the plummeting cost of content creation and coordination now lets a single person with a laptop run campaigns that once required an entire organization. He said that as early as 2021, during the nonprofit phase, the system caught only one of four manipulation attempts tested — a demonstration of the widening gap between offensive capabilities and existing defensive tools.