For our final Cohort 13 Startup Stories, we are so excited to introduce Cody Coleman, the co-founder and CEO of Coactive AI!
“Over the past decade, we’ve seen an unprecedented surge in content, leaving organizations inundated with vast amounts of visual content that acts more like a tax (or liability) than an asset,” said Cody Coleman. “Our multimodal application platform empowers organizations to effortlessly search and analyze this immense volume of unstructured image and video data—no PhD or metadata required. We help deliver intelligent context to content at scale.”
Driven by their passion for technology and fascination with artificial intelligence, Coleman and his co-founder, William A. Gaviria Rojas, created Coactive AI in 2021. Having both studied at MIT, they shared an interest in the rapidly evolving field of AI. Recognizing the growing importance of data-driven decision-making in businesses, Coleman and Gaviria focused on enhancing machine learning capabilities to extract insights faster. They observed that visual data – like images and videos – posed unique challenges due to its unstructured nature and sheer volume.
Simply put – organizing this data manually was so time-consuming and inefficient that most companies were not even trying.
To tackle this problem, Coactive developed a breakthrough multimodal AI technology that enables users to search through visual content far more effectively. For example, users can ask questions like, “How many images like this have been uploaded?” or “Who is uploading images like these?” Coactive’s innovation lies in optimizing the process of tagging, loading, and searching visual data for enterprises. Coactive automates the loading and indexing of raw images, making them easily searchable, and doing so in a fraction of time and resources traditionally required. The company was recognized in 2023 on Forbes list of the Top 50 AI startups in the world. In one powerful example, Coactive worked with a Fortune 500 retailer that needed to sift through a vast collection of product images and videos for marketing purposes. With Coactive’s AI-powered solution, the retailer could quickly find the most suitable content in minutes rather than hours, or not at all.
Coleman earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and a Ph.D. from Stanford. He gained valuable industry experience through internships at tech giants like Google, Pinterest, Jump Trading LLC, and Facebook, before venturing into entrepreneurship and eventually founding Coactive.
Cody was born in prison. His personal story and journey to Coactive is deeply inspiring. Coactive’s partner Amazon put together an amazing three-minute video story on Cody and Coactive that everyone should watch. https://shorturl.at/g59na