MIT alumni’s AI platform turns visual chaos into business insights

Coactive, an AI-powered platform founded by MIT alumni, has raised significant attention for its ability to analyze unstructured visual data like images, audio, and video at enterprise scale. The company addresses a critical business blind spot—while 80-90% of global data is unstructured, most companies lack tools to extract insights from their visual content, creating massive untapped value in their data repositories.

What you should know: Coactive’s platform serves as an “AI operating system” that can instantly search, organize, and analyze visual content without manual tagging or sorting.

• The model-agnostic system allows businesses to swap out AI models as technology improves, while providing prebuilt applications for content search, metadata generation, and analytics.
• Founded by Cody Coleman ’13, MEng ’15 and William Gaviria Rojas ’13, the company is already working with major media and retail companies to unlock insights from their visual data.

Real-world impact: Reuters has transformed its photo database management using Coactive’s AI search capabilities.

• Previously, journalists manually tagged millions of photos, creating a slow and expensive process that left many images unsearchable.
• With Coactive’s “Enable AI Search” feature, journalists can now find relevant content based on the AI system’s understanding of image details, vastly improving search results and story accuracy.

Key customer success: Fandom, serving over 300 million monthly users with TV, gaming, and movie content, uses Coactive to moderate visual content in online communities.

• Content review time dropped from 24-48 hours to an average of 500 milliseconds.
• The platform helps automatically remove excessive gore and sexualized content by codifying community guidelines into AI-powered moderation.

The bigger vision: Coleman and Gaviria Rojas see their work as fundamentally changing human-computer interaction paradigms.

• “Throughout the history of human-computer interaction, we’ve had to bend over a keyboard and mouse to input information in a way that machines could understand,” Coleman explains.
• The founders envision a future where humans can communicate naturally with AI through images, video, and speech, requiring “a new operating system and a new way of working with content and AI.”

What they’re saying: The founders emphasize AI’s potential to enhance human capabilities rather than replace them.

• “The word coactive means to work together concurrently, and that’s our grand vision: helping humans and machines work together,” Coleman says.
• “We believe that vision is more important now than ever because AI can either pull us apart or bring us together. We want Coactive to be an agent that pulls us together and gives human beings a new set of superpowers.”