
Coactive AI Platform Helps Machines Understand Visual Content, Empowering Businesses
In today’s data-driven world, businesses are increasingly reliant on data to inform their decisions. However, many companies face a significant challenge: understanding the wealth of information contained within their visual data. Coactive, founded by MIT alumni Cody Coleman and William Gaviria Rojas, is tackling this problem head-on with its artificial intelligence-powered platform.
Coactive’s platform is designed to analyze unstructured visual content, including images, audio, and video, providing businesses with valuable insights that were previously inaccessible. This allows companies to search, organize, and analyze visual data efficiently, leading to faster and more informed decision-making.
According to Coleman, while businesses have become adept at extracting value from structured data, a significant portion of the world’s data remains unstructured. He emphasizes that AI is crucial for processing images, video, and audio at scale, enabling companies to unlock the full potential of their data assets.
Coactive is already collaborating with major media and retail companies to help them gain a deeper understanding of their visual content. By automating the sorting and tagging process, Coactive enables these companies to deliver relevant content to users more quickly, identify and remove inappropriate content, and gain insights into user behavior.
The founders view Coactive as a tool that empowers humans to work more effectively and address complex challenges. Coleman emphasizes the importance of humans and machines working together, stating that Coactive aims to facilitate this collaboration and provide individuals with enhanced capabilities.
Coleman and Gaviria Rojas’s journey began at MIT, where they studied electrical engineering and computer science. Their shared experiences, including a project to bring MIT OpenCourseWare content to Mexican universities, ignited their entrepreneurial spirit and laid the foundation for Coactive.
Coleman’s exploration of AI’s potential during his graduate research at MIT’s Office of Digital Learning further fueled his passion for the field. He recognized the transformative power of AI in democratizing education and delivering personalized learning experiences.
After MIT, Coleman continued his research at Stanford University, focusing on reducing barriers to AI adoption. This work led to collaborations with companies like Pinterest and Meta, providing him with valuable insights into the future of AI applications.
Gaviria Rojas’s experience as a data scientist at eBay further solidified their vision for Coactive. Together, they recognized the untapped potential of multimodal data and the need for a technology that could unlock its value at scale.
Coactive’s platform is designed to be model agnostic, allowing the company to adapt to the latest advancements in AI. It offers prebuilt applications that enable businesses to search content, generate metadata, and conduct analytics, empowering them to extract valuable insights from their visual data.
Coleman emphasizes that AI is bridging the gap between how computers and humans perceive the world. He believes that this will lead to a blurring of the lines between the digital and physical realms, opening up new possibilities for human-computer interaction.
Reuters, a global news organization, is leveraging Coactive to improve the efficiency of its image database. By enabling AI-powered search, Reuters can provide journalists with more relevant images, enhancing their ability to tell accurate and compelling stories.
Fandom, a popular platform for TV show, videogame, and movie information, is using Coactive to understand visual data within its online communities and remove inappropriate content. This has significantly reduced the time required to review new content and maintain community standards.
The founders envision Coactive as a catalyst for a new era of human-computer interaction, where machines can understand and respond to natural language, images, and video. This will transform the way we work and interact with technology, empowering us to solve complex problems and achieve new levels of efficiency.



