Coactive AI, founded in 2021 and based in San Jose, set out to solve the problem of unstructured visual content. Enterprises sit on enormous archives of video and images that are effectively invisible to search — finding a specific moment, scene, or object means manual tagging or hours of human review. Coactive's multimodal AI converts that visual content into structured, queryable intelligence, so teams can search libraries in natural language and retrieve exactly the frames or clips they need.
The platform automates metadata generation at extraordinary scale — the company cites the ability to produce over a billion tags per hour and to process petabyte-scale libraries with sub-500-millisecond query latency. That performance underpins a range of enterprise use cases: contextual advertising that places ads against precisely understood content, content operations that automate production and asset management, brand safety and moderation, and marketing personalization that matches creative assets at scale.
Coactive has raised $44 million across three rounds. It went to market with $14 million in combined seed and Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, alongside angels including Stanford AI leaders Fei-Fei Li and Jure Leskovec. In May 2024 it announced a $30 million Series B co-led by Cherryrock Capital (in its first investment) and Emerson Collective, with Greycroft and prior investors a16z, Bessemer, and Exceptional Capital participating, at a reported $200 million valuation.
The company sits at the intersection of video understanding, search, and content intelligence, competing with both internal tooling and emerging multimodal platforms. Its differentiation is enterprise-grade scale and reliability — SOC 2 Type II certification, an API-first architecture, and integrations with major cloud storage — paired with the speed needed to query petabyte libraries in real time.
For businesses, Coactive turns dormant visual archives into an active asset and revenue engine. Media companies, retailers, and advertisers can unlock content for search, monetization, safety, and personalization without armies of human taggers. As organizations accumulate ever more video and imagery, infrastructure that makes that content understandable and queryable becomes increasingly essential.