Will Gaviria Rojas: “Pioneering Scalable AI for Visual Data Systems”

Title: Co-Founder & Field CTO
Organization: Coactive AI
Age: 34

Will Gaviria Rojas is the Co-Founder and Field CTO of Coactive AI, a Silicon Valley company that enables major media and technology organizations to search, tag and analyze large volumes of images and videos — unlocking value from content that was previously difficult to operationalize and monetize at scale. Founded in 2021, Coactive has raised over $44M from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greycroft, Cherryrock Capital, and Emerson Collective, and counts NBCUniversal, Thomson Reuters, Live Nation, and other leading media and technology companies among its customers. Coactive AI has been recognized on the Forbes AI 50, Forbes Next Billion Dollar Startup, and Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, where it ranked #3 in Applied AI in 2026.

Born in Colombia, Will holds a BS from MIT and a PhD from Northwestern University, and before co-founding Coactive worked as a researcher across academic and industry institutions and as a Data Scientist at eBay Ads.

Beyond Coactive, Will has played a key role in shaping the AI benchmarking ecosystem. He co-founded DataPerf, a benchmark initiative focused on how data quality impacts model performance. He also created Dollar Street, a benchmark for socioeconomic bias in multimodal models widely adopted by the field and used in the development of foundation models including Google Gemini, SigLIP, and OpenCLIP. Most recently, he founded MediaPerf, an open benchmark for evaluating AI video understanding in multimodal foundation models built around the real data and production tasks the media industry actually deploys, with support from NVIDIA, AWS, NBCUniversal, Business Insider, Harvard, and Georgia Tech.

As a Latino founder, Will is personally committed to building ladders for the next generation — angel investing in underrepresented entrepreneurs, mentoring operators, and working to strengthen the Latino startup community through his network, events, and advocacy. This commitment extends to his technical contributions in building AI systems that are more inclusive, reliable, and impactful.