Coactive

Coactive (also referred to as Coactive AI and, in one funding report, Coactive Systems) develops a multimodal AI platform that makes large libraries of images and video searchable and analyzable without requiring pre-existing metadata or manual tags. The system indexes raw visual assets and extracts context directly from pixels and audio, allowing customers to define their own concepts and tags and then locate matching moments, scenes, and videos across their archives. The company describes this as inverting the conventional "tag, load, search" workflow into a "load, search, tag" approach, and markets the result as a contextual intelligence layer in which content is indexed once and reused across advertising, search, recommendation, and moderation applications [0][1][3].

Product positioning centers on four workflow areas: contextual advertising (turning content libraries into targetable, privacy-resilient ad inventory that does not depend on third-party cookies), content operations and workflow (natural-language retrieval across editorial, production, news, and archive assets to replace manual tagging), content moderation and brand safety (placement-level suitability scoring against customer-specific guidelines), and audience targeting. A product called Context Studio, described on the site as new, converts campaign strategy into activation-ready contextual packages [0][1].

The founding team comes from machine learning research and benchmarking backgrounds. CEO and co-founder Cody Coleman is a co-creator of DAWNBench and MLPerf, a founding member of MLCommons, and holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford plus MEng and BS degrees from MIT. Co-founder and Field CTO Will Gaviria Rojas is a former eBay data scientist, a co-creator of the DataPerf benchmarks associated with the data-centric AI movement, and creator of the Dollar Street socioeconomic-bias benchmark; he holds a PhD from Northwestern and a BS from MIT. Other named leaders include Josh Heller (Chief Revenue Officer, previously Amperity), Satya Komala (Head of Engineering, previously Postman, NIO, Tesla, Microsoft), Tia Gordon (Head of People) and Peter Lee (Head of Finance, previously Guggenheim Securities). Advisors listed include Ken Coleman [2][3][5].

Founding story

Cody Coleman and Will Gaviria Rojas founded Coactive in 2021 to address the gap between the volume of enterprise image and video content and enterprises' ability to do anything with it beyond storage — what Coleman describes as content being a tax or liability rather than an asset [3]. Both founders came from machine learning benchmarking and data-centric AI research work [2].

Business model

Coactive sells an enterprise software platform to organizations that own large image and video libraries; the site directs prospects to request a demo and highlights deployments across publishers, brands, agencies, and platforms. The company frames the platform as a single indexing layer whose output is reused across multiple applications without reprocessing [0][1].

Not specified in the available sources beyond enterprise platform sales via demo-led engagement [0][1].

Traction

Published case-study results include Fandom auto-moderating 90% of uploads with a 74% reduction in manual review and 50% cost reduction (a separate account cites 88% of manual labeling automated within four weeks); an NBCUniversal contextual package associated with a 56% search engagement lift, 7x more site visits, and a 38% brand perception lift; and a digital agency improving creative-intelligence precision from 59% to over 95% while saving five hours per run [0][1][3].

Latest developments

Coactive is promoting Context Studio, described on its site as newly available, which converts campaign strategy into activation-ready contextual packages, alongside an NBCUniversal executive endorsement of scene- and episode-level contextual targeting [0][1]. The most recent disclosed financing is the May 2024 $30 million Series B [3][4].