Former President Donald Trump is preparing to launch his own social network called Truth Social and just tapped a local company to help with content moderation as it ramps up to launch later this quarter.
On Tuesday Fox Business reported that Trump Media & Technology Group, or TMTG, had hired San Francisco-based Hive to help make Truth Social "a very safe place," TruthSocial CEO Devin Nunes told the news site.
Nunes resigned from Congress, where he represented parts of the Central Valley including Fresno, on Jan. 1 to get the site up and running. The effort comes about a year after Trump was kicked off of nearly every mainstream social media site in the wake of his efforts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and his role in inciting the Capitol insurgency.
"We want to be very family-friendly, we want this to be a very safe place, and we are focused on making sure any illegal content is not on the site," Nunes, the former Republican congressman, told Fox Business. "Hive has a great track record in this, and they have been good to work with."
Kevin Guo, Hive's co-founder and CEO, told Fox Business that the company would be helping Truth Social weed out content that is sexually explicit, violent, bullying, hateful and spam.
Here's what we know about Hive:
It's a cloud-based AI company. The startup uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide a range of services, including content moderation, multimedia transcription and analysis, and data annotation. According to its website, it services industries as varied as media and entertainment, technology and communications, hospitality and travel, retail, restaurants, utilities, financial services, transportation, consumer goods and manufacturing.
Large and smaller brands use its services. It counts enterprise businesses like Walmart, Visa and ABInBev as clients, as well as Reddit and Giphy (which was acquired by Facebook, now Meta, in 2020). It also reportedly worked with Parler (the conservative-leaning app founded in 2018 by Jared Thomson, John Matze and Rebekah Mercer) after it was kicked off Apple's App Store for its role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurgency in D.C., according to Fox News.
Hive considers itself a "neutral" platform. Guo told Fox Business that the company will work with anyone who needs its services. "I don’t care who you are, if you want to make your community a safer place, you should be given the tools to do so," Guo said. "We commit ourselves to being a very neutral ground in that sense… If a partner wants to use us, and we think they are doing a good job, using our models well, and putting in good-faith moderation, we’re going to keep supporting them, no matter what the external pressures may be."
Guo was a medical research assistant before going into venture capital and then tech. According to LinkedIn, Guo worked on tumor imaging and gene therapy research at the Washington University School of Medicine and Stanford University School of Medicine for several years beginning in the mid-2000s. He was then a fellow at Lightspeed Ventures and a venture associate at Mithril Capital Management from 2012-2015. His first startup, Kiwi, was "a mobile first, Q&A based social discovery platform driven by AI" that he started as part of a class project at Stanford, according to Guo's LinkedIn profile, and it looks like Hive evolved out of that in 2017.
Hive has raised nearly $148 million since 2014. According to PitchBook, Hive raised a $2.1 million seed round in 2014. It's most recent round was an $85 million Series D in April 2021 that valued the company at $2 billion. The startup's investors include Bain & Co., Visa Ventures, General Catalyst, 8VC and Founders Fund.
