# Cody Coleman

> Cody Coleman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Coactive AI, a San Jose-based enterprise AI platform that brings structure to unstructured visual content - images and video - using multimodal AI. Born in prison and raised by grandparents on Social Security, he earned a BS from MIT and a PhD from Stanford, where he co-created DAWNBench and MLPerf, the industry-standard ML benchmarking suite. Today he leads a 63-person company backed by $44M in funding from Emerson Collective, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz, with a mission to make AI accessible regardless of background.

- **Role:** CEO & Co-Founder at Coactive AI
- **Organizations:** Coactive AI, MLCommons, Stanford University (Alumni), MIT (Alumni)
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), PhD in Computer Science, Stanford University
- **Known for:** Co-created MLPerf, the industry-standard machine learning benchmark suite used by Google, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA, Co-created DAWNBench, a time-to-accuracy ML performance benchmark with 102+ academic citations, Founding member of MLCommons, the open benchmarking organization for AI/ML

## Career timeline

- **2009-2013** — BS in EECS at MIT via QuestBridge scholarship; president of EECS honor society
- **2016-2021** — PhD in Computer Science at Stanford, advised by Matei Zaharia and Peter Bailis; NSF Fellowship recipient
- **2018** — Co-created DAWNBench, a time-to-accuracy ML performance benchmark
- **2019** — Co-created MLPerf, the industry-standard ML benchmark suite adopted by Google, Meta, and Microsoft
- **2020** — Founding member of MLCommons, the open ML benchmarking organization
- **2021** — Co-founded Coactive AI with William Gaviria Rojas
- **2022** — Coactive AI completes seed funding round
- **2023** — Coactive AI raises Series A; Coleman delivers ETL talk at Stanford eCorner
- **2024-05** — Coactive AI closes $30M Series B at ~$200M valuation co-led by Emerson Collective and Cherryrock Capital

## Achievements

- Co-created MLPerf, the industry-standard machine learning benchmark suite used by Google, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA
- Co-created DAWNBench, a time-to-accuracy ML performance benchmark with 102+ academic citations
- Founding member of MLCommons, the open benchmarking organization for AI/ML
- 15+ research publications with 1,100+ total citations on Google Scholar
- Raised $44M total for Coactive AI including a $30M Series B at ~$200M valuation
- TEDx Stanford speaker on education and socioeconomic opportunity
- QuestBridge Scholar who overcame extreme adversity to attend MIT and Stanford
- National Science Foundation Fellowship recipient at Stanford
- Featured in CBS News for overcoming extraordinary life circumstances to lead a Silicon Valley startup

## Latest updates

- **2024-05** — Coactive AI closes $30M Series B led by Emerson Collective and Cherryrock Capital at ~$200M valuation
- **2024-04** — Launched MediaPerf, the first open benchmark for AI video understanding in the media industry
- **2026-04** — Featured speaker at HumanX Conference 2026
- **2023-10** — Delivered Entrepreneurial Thought Leader (ETL) lecture at Stanford eCorner

## Links

- Website: https://www.codycoleman.com/
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/codyaustun
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/codyacoleman
- GitHub: https://github.com/codyaustun
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codycoleman/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/cody-coleman
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-13