Coco Mao is the CEO and co-founder of OpenArt AI, the creative platform that grew from a viral Hacker News post about AI image prompts to $70M+ ARR with just 20 people. A Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who spent seven years at Google building search products and the Tangi short-form video app, she left in 2022 to co-found OpenArt with CTO John Qiao. Under her leadership, OpenArt scaled 7x in 2025, reached 8 million monthly active users, raised a $30M Series A from Canaan Partners, and launched One-Click Story — a feature that lets anyone turn a single sentence into a complete video with persistent characters.
OctoAI (formerly OctoML) was a Seattle-based AI infrastructure company founded in 2019 by University of Washington researchers — including Apache TVM creator Tianqi Chen and CEO Luis Ceze. The company built a generative AI inference platform that gave developers fast, affordable API access to leading open-source LLMs and image generation models, along with OctoStack, an enterprise-grade private AI deployment stack. After raising ~$132M and pivoting from ML optimization to GenAI infrastructure, OctoAI was acquired by NVIDIA in September 2024 and wound down its commercial services by October 31, 2024.