The Story
Where the Story Starts: A Viral Hacker News Post
In the summer of 2022, Coco Mao and her co-founder John Qiao had just left Google. They noticed something strange happening across the internet: people were generating AI images everywhere but couldn't figure out how to write effective prompts. So Coco and John built the simplest possible fix - a browsing platform that paired AI-generated images with the exact prompts that created them. They called it "Pinterest for AI images" and posted it to Hacker News. It became the top story of the day.
"Pinterest for AI images" - that's how Coco described OpenArt's first version to Hacker News in 2022. It hit number one. What they'd built was a window: not an art tool, but a way to see how other people prompted AI. That window became a platform. That platform is now at $70M+ ARR.
Before that post, Coco spent seven years at Google moving from iOS software engineer to product manager - a rare transition that required proving she could think in systems, not just syntax. She worked on Google Photos, spent time as a senior engineer improving the product with machine learning, then made the leap to product management inside Area 120, Google's experimental startup lab. There she co-created Tangi - a short-form "how-to" creative video app that reached millions of monthly active users before being folded into Google Search.
Tangi was essentially a dry run. Short-form creative content, a community of people who wanted to make things, distribution that relied on the audience's desire to learn - and a founder who was already thinking about how technology lowers the bar for making. When Coco and John left Google to start OpenArt, they weren't starting from scratch. They were resuming a thesis.
"We believe everyone is fundamentally creative - but not everyone has craftsmanship." - Coco Mao, Product Hunt
The pivot that turned OpenArt from a prompt-browsing tool into a storytelling platform came from listening carefully to what users kept asking for. The single most-requested feature was consistent character generation - the ability to use the same character in multiple images. Coco realized the implication immediately: users weren't trying to generate isolated images. They were trying to tell stories. That insight rewrote OpenArt's entire product roadmap.
By 2024, OpenArt's character consistency feature had ranked number one on Product Hunt. Revenue climbed from $1M to $10M ARR in twelve months. The company had built something that the big foundation model players - Sora, Pika, Runway - weren't prioritizing: a simplified, workflow-first approach for creators who needed results, not controls. Coco's framework for this is direct: "Most users need the equivalent of Uber and Lyft - not to drive the car manually themselves."
When users kept requesting character consistency, Coco didn't just build the feature. She asked why. The answer changed everything: people weren't making art. They were trying to make characters - because characters are the unit of story. That realization turned an image tool into a narrative platform.
In July 2025, OpenArt launched One-Click Story: enter a sentence, a script, or a song lyric, and get back a one-minute video with a complete narrative arc and persistent characters. The feature runs on more than 50 integrated AI models. TechCrunch covered it. The AI community shared it. The company's monthly active user count was sitting at 6 million when the feature launched and kept moving. Revenue hit $70M+ ARR by year-end - a 7x increase in a single year - with a team of roughly 20 people. In January 2026, Canaan Partners led a $30M Series A. Total raised: $35M.
What Coco built isn't a Midjourney competitor or a Runway rival. It's infrastructure for a new category she describes as "AI-native IP" - persistent visual characters and story universes that live across social media, entertainment, and advertising. The bet is that as creation costs collapse, enduring characters become the scarce asset. OpenArt is positioned to be where those characters are born, trained, and deployed at scale.
"A problem that a lot of AI couldn't really handle well is to have the character consistent in the same video. If you don't have the same character, then it's hard to get immersed in the story." - Coco Mao, TechCrunch
In Q1 2026, OpenArt hosted the first AI Influencer Summit in San Francisco and produced "Bot House" - framed as the first AI reality television show. These are not product launches. They are cultural bets. Coco is positioning OpenArt not as a tool company but as the infrastructure layer for the next generation of creative IP - a place where AI characters have consistent identities, persistent narratives, and audiences that follow them.
Born in Shanghai on November 22, 1993, Coco studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University with a minor in mathematics, graduating in 2015. She also studied at Jacobs University Bremen. Her early internships included LinkedIn and IMC Trading, where she built features and trading apps before Google recruited her. Outside work, she's been characteristically candid about her interests: "startups, the color pink, and goldendoodles." That combination of technical precision, aesthetic preference, and community warmth runs through everything OpenArt builds.
The company she's building is a direct answer to a belief she's held since before the company existed: that everyone is fundamentally creative, but the tools have always been gatekept by craftsmanship. AI doesn't replace the desire to create. It removes the technical barrier. Coco's job, as she sees it, is to build the simplest possible bridge between what someone imagines and what they can share with the world.