Twelve years at the helm of Silicon Valley's ops engine. Now steering an AI-powered visual intelligence startup from the inside.
There's a particular kind of person that fast-moving companies quietly depend on - someone who has seen enough of how large enterprises actually work to know which parts a startup should copy, and which parts it should ditch entirely. Lisa Page is that person at Coactive AI.
As Executive Business Partner to CEO Cody Coleman, Page sits at the intersection of strategy and execution at one of enterprise AI's most watched platforms. Coactive has built what it calls a Multimodal Application Platform - technology that allows companies to search, classify, and analyze images and videos without needing any pre-existing metadata or manual tagging. Images and video represent 80% of all internet traffic, yet for most organizations they remain an unsearchable black box. Coactive changes that. Lisa Page helps make sure the company operates with the discipline to deliver on that ambition.
She came to Coactive in July 2025 after stops at Attentive, Databricks, and a decade-long tenure at Salesforce. That's not a resume built for stability. That's a career built for growth stages - the hypergrowth phase, the scaling phase, the enterprise pivot. She's lived each one from the inside.
When Coactive announced her hire, Page put it plainly: "Cody and Will have such a strong vision for what AI can do, and I'm inspired to be part of it. After more than a decade working with some of the largest companies in tech, I'm excited to join a startup environment where I can experience the growth and evolution of the platform firsthand." CEO Cody Coleman responded with rare public enthusiasm - the kind usually reserved for senior product hires, not executive partners. That says something.
Page's career arc follows something like the history of enterprise software itself. She was at Salesforce when cloud CRM went from novelty to industry standard. She was at Databricks as the data lakehouse model rewrote how companies think about AI infrastructure. Now she's at Coactive - ground level, again - as multimodal AI makes unstructured visual data something companies can actually work with. She has a habit of showing up at the right inflection point.
Before any of that, she cut her teeth in places that have nothing to do with software. The USA Rugby Team. A logistics firm. A sports management company. A cable giant in Comcast. Each one taught her something about organizations in different states of motion - underfunded and scrappy, slow and institutional, geographically dispersed. That range is the kind of thing no MBA program manufactures.
Her academic foundation sits at San Francisco State University, where she studied Business Management with a focus on Hospitality Management and Tourism. It's a field built on the operational choreography of making complex, high-stakes experiences feel effortless for the people involved. If that sounds like the unspoken job description of an Executive Business Partner to a startup CEO, that's because it is.
Coactive AI raised $30 million in Series B funding in May 2024, bringing its total funding to $44 million and its valuation to $200 million. The investors include names that don't write small checks on speculative bets: Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greycroft, Cherryrock Capital, and Emerson Collective. The company counts Fortune 500 retailers, media and entertainment companies, and major content platforms among its clients. One of them - Fandom - automated 88% of its manual image labeling within four weeks of deploying Coactive's platform. That's the kind of result that changes how a company thinks about AI.
At 63 employees and growing, Coactive is past the chaotic-startup phase but nowhere near the institutional-slowness phase. It's the stage where what you do next actually determines whether you get to a Series C or not. The kind of stage where an experienced operator who has watched multiple companies navigate this exact transition is not a luxury - it's table stakes. Lisa Page, apparently, understood that before anyone had to explain it to her.
"Cody and Will have such a strong vision for what AI can do, and I'm inspired to be part of it. After more than a decade working with some of the largest companies in tech, I'm excited to join a startup environment where I can experience the growth and evolution of the platform firsthand."
- Lisa Page, on joining Coactive AI (July 2025)A career that tracks the history of enterprise software - from CRM dominance to data platforms to multimodal AI.
Coactive AI built the Multimodal Application Platform (MAP) - enterprise software that processes images, video, and audio directly from pixels, without requiring pre-existing metadata or manual tagging. Clients use it to power intelligent search, content moderation, visual analytics, and contextual advertising at scale.
The traditional workflow for visual content ran: tag it, load it, then search it. Coactive flipped that to load, search, and then tag - turning a multi-week labeling exercise into something that happens automatically, in real time. For clients like Fandom, that translated to automating 88% of manual labeling within four weeks of deployment.
Key Investors
Co-founders Cody Coleman (CEO, Stanford PhD) and Will Gaviria Rojas (Field CTO, Northwestern PhD, MIT BS) built Coactive out of Stanford's AI research environment. Coleman co-created DAWNBench and MLPerf - two benchmarks that have shaped how the industry measures AI performance.
Ten years at one company is a statement. Lisa Page spent a decade at Salesforce - 2012 to 2022 - during the period when Marc Benioff's cloud CRM company grew from a disruptive bet into an enterprise titan. She supported senior leadership through acquisitions, product pivots, and the slow, grinding work of building the operational machinery that keeps a 30,000-person company moving. That's a masterclass that no conference talk can replicate.
When she left for Databricks in September 2022, it was a calculated move toward the next wave. Databricks - valued at over $40 billion - was redefining the data stack beneath every enterprise AI project, and Page was inside the tent as it happened. She stayed two years, long enough to absorb how a company built on Apache Spark had transformed itself into the central nervous system of the modern data-driven enterprise.
A brief stint at Attentive as Executive Assistant to the Chief Product Officer in early 2025 kept her skills sharp before Coactive AI came calling. The move to Coactive represents something different from her previous stops: not a mature company scaling, but a growth-stage startup still defining what "scale" even means for it. That's the hardest transition to make in operations, and she made it voluntarily.
The early chapters of her career tell their own story. Before enterprise software, there was USA Rugby. Before SaaS, there was Comcast Cable. Before Salesforce, there were companies most people have never heard of - InsureWorx, Golden Eagle Express, Cool World Sports. Each one was a different size, a different sector, a different kind of chaos. A decade of variety like that trains a particular kind of problem-solver: one who doesn't need a standard operating procedure because they've been in enough situations where none existed.
The executive support function at a 63-person AI startup is different from the same role at a 63,000-person SaaS giant. The stakes are higher per decision. The chaos is more personal. And the outcome actually shows up on the scoreboard within quarters, not years.
YesPress Editorial
Before cloud CRM and AI platforms, Lisa Page managed operations for the USA Rugby Team - where organizational logistics meant actual logistics: travel, scheduling, and keeping a national sports program running on limited resources.
Her degree is in Hospitality Management and Tourism from San Francisco State University. Hospitality operations - the art of making complexity invisible to the people in the room - turns out to be excellent preparation for making CEOs more effective.
Coactive AI's platform can process visual content without any pre-existing metadata. Lisa Page joined a company that taught machines to read images the way humans do - by looking at them, not by reading their labels.
Coactive raised its $30M Series B at a $200 million valuation in May 2024 - backed by a16z, Bessemer, Emerson Collective, and Greycroft. Lisa Page joined just over a year later, at exactly the stage where operational talent becomes a competitive moat.
Her career has now spanned five industries: sports management, logistics, media/cable, enterprise SaaS, and AI. That's not a lack of focus. That's a pattern of following hard problems into new domains - which is exactly what good operators do.