Gudea has raised $7 million in seed funding to help companies anticipate which online narratives will go viral and understand who is driving them, the startup tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
Mudita Venture Partners and Silicon Road Ventures co-led the round, bringing the Minneapolis-based startup’s total funding to about $15 million since its 2023 inception, according to co-founder and CEO Keith Presley.
The company says its revenue has grown 357% year over year. Its customers include major AI companies and businesses in telecommunications, entertainment and retail, although it declined to identify them, citing the sensitive nature of its work.
Gudea’s premise is that tracking mentions and hashtags tells companies only part of the story. The startup aims to map how information moves across people, groups and platforms, then predict how far a narrative will spread, when it will take off, and when it will fade.
Presley describes Gudea as the “storm tracker for the internet.”
“As a meteorologist uses patterns to predict the weather, we’re using patterns to predict information,” he said in an interview, adding that the startup covers over 600 social media platforms.
From disrupting disinformation to tracking brands
James Thomin, Georgia Paul and
Keith Presley. (Courtesy photo)
The business grew out of the George Washington Initiative, a nonprofit that adapted tactics used by the intelligence community to disrupt online Al Qaeda and ISIS networks for domestic information campaigns. The team initially searched for existing software that could show how information traveled, but found social listening tools insufficient.
James Thomin, Gudea’s CTO and one of its founders, began working on technology to map those pathways. When the team examined the backlash around Bud Light’s marketing campaign with actor Dylan Mulvaney, it reached a turning point. The campaign’s critics used the same information pathways that had carried COVID disinformation, noted Presley.
The team realized “that these patterns were repeating, and that there was a much broader use case,” he recalled.
The technology spun out into a company in 2023. Its initial commercial focus has been reputational risk management, which entails helping large businesses spot potentially consequential stories before they spread widely.
“We don’t need to know what we’re looking for to find it, so we can find all of those good or bad narratives before you know what keywords you should be searching for,” Presley said.
Who’s driving the conversation?
One way Gudea operates is by assessing whether users or accounts exhibiting unusual behavior are driving online conversations. It also examines how narratives move from less visible online communities into more mainstream platforms.
For example, the startup conducted an analysis of online claims linking Taylor Swift to Nazism around an album release. 1 Georgia Paul, Gudea’s director of client experience, told Crunchbase News that the analysis uncovered that the narrative was being manipulated.
The company says its work has also involved cases of corporate espionage and stock market manipulation. More recently, it has been examining how conversations about data centers affect businesses in AI and energy. Its technology can also identify positive trends companies might capitalize on, according to Paul, in addition to reputational threats.
Predicting what spreads next
Gudea uses deep learning, including graph neural networks, to analyze behavior, and uses a large language model to summarize findings.
“Those behavior patterns are like fingerprints, and so our AI then recognizes those fingerprints, pulls it out, and then we use an LLM to summarize,” Presley said.
The company sells its software to businesses through offerings that include alerts, platform access and automatically delivered reports. The latter emerged from its work with senior teams that were unlikely to log into a platform themselves.
Presley cited Blackbird, Cyabra and Alethea as competitors in narrative intelligence, while positioning Gudea’s predictions as its distinguishing feature.
Gudea tells customers “how long till it goes viral, how many people will be impacted, and how long till it goes away,” he said.
For Gudea, the broader aim remains connected to its nonprofit origins: making the mechanisms behind online information more visible.
“People are making real-world decisions off of what they see online, and not all of that information is authentic,” Presley said.
The startup plans to use its new capital to expand its team, develop new features and broaden its coverage across platforms, languages and regions. It currently has 39 customers and approximately 25 employees.
Buddy Foster, investor at Mudita Venture Partners, notes that AI is changing how stories are spread on the internet.
“Damage to a brand is now starting in the fringe parts of the internet and builds momentum before it ever reaches a headline. It’s a big problem,” he wrote via email. “Gudea has built a solution that has the potential to own the market and know more than just the headlines. They can really see what is coming before it’s a problem.”
Most other tools on the market are “reactive and surface-layer,” in Foster’s view, whereas Gudea is more proactive.
“Gudea models how information moves across the internet and hundreds of platforms, so it can spot a problem before anyone knows to search for it,” he added. “Since it looks at behavior instead of content, its ability to be proactive gets better even as the internet gets more clouded.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
Gudea conducted that research for press coverage rather than for Swift, who was not a client.↩
