Category Visionaries William Gaviria Rojas, Field CTO & Co-Founder of CoactiveAI: $44 Million Raised to Build the Future of Multimodal AI Applications
CoactiveAI is pioneering the multimodal application platform (MAP) category, enabling companies to unlock value from their visual content through AI-powered search, tagging, and analytics. In this episode of Category Visionaries, I sat down with William Gaviria Rojas, Field CTO & Co-Founder of CoactiveAI to discuss his inspiring journey from Colombian refugee to MIT graduate and successful founder, as well as CoactiveAI's vision for transforming how enterprises work with visual content.
Topics Discussed:
- William's journey from Colombian refugee to MIT and entrepreneurship
- The founding story of CoactiveAI and early backing from a16z
- Evolution of the AI landscape pre and post-ChatGPT
- Creating the multimodal application platform category
- Building AI applications for media and entertainment companies
- Challenges and opportunities in trust and safety use cases
- Going from prototypes to production AI implementations
GTM Lessons for B2B Founders:
- Category Creation Through Customer Discovery: Rather than trying to serve every vertical initially, CoactiveAI went through a deliberate "market annealing" process. Through extensive customer conversations, they discovered that media and entertainment companies had the most complex content challenges and could derive the most immediate value from their technology. Focus on finding the intersection of your technical capabilities and the markets where you can have the biggest impact.
- Technical Differentiation in a Crowded Market: When the AI space became crowded post-ChatGPT, CoactiveAI maintained their edge by emphasizing their deep technical capabilities built since 2021. William notes, "We weren't some sort of light wrapper around OpenAI or ChatGPT." In emerging technology markets, having genuine technical differentiation can help you stand out from opportunistic newcomers.
- Enterprise Partnership Strategy: Rather than pursuing transactional sales, CoactiveAI focuses on building true partnerships with enterprise customers. As William explains, "If you just come to somebody like a vendor and that's really all you're kind of doing, this is just kind of a transactional sale." Instead, they invest in deeply understanding customer pain points and collaborating on solutions, which has led to successful deployments with major companies like NBCUniversal and Thomson Reuters.
- Evolving Value Proposition: William observed that while 2024 was about prototypes and proofs of concept, 2025 is focused on demonstrating real ROI from AI implementations. He emphasizes the importance of having clear customer success stories and ROI metrics as the market matures. B2B founders should anticipate and adapt to these shifts in buyer expectations.
- Vision-Driven Culture: CoactiveAI published their culture on GitHub as one of their first actions, emphasizing that success isn't just about business metrics but also about how you achieve that success. William's vision includes building "ladders" for the next generation of diverse founders. This clear mission has helped attract talent and align the team around common goals.
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