Joe Monastiero is the founder and CEO of visualAI, which builds discoverGPT, a 360 degree AI commerce discovery developer platform with a REST API and 29 MCP tools supporting the deployment of trimodal search, virtual try-on and image composition, data cleaning and enrichment and the generation of universal agentic catalog feeds.

He has spent 25 years on the commercial side of technology companies. He co-founded Intervideo, which IPO'd on NASDAQ as IVII and was later acquired by Corel, and co-founded appMobi, acquired by Intel. From 2013 to 2020 he built nFlate/SiBi, one of the first multimodal visual search marketplaces for fashion, with discovery by photo, screenshot, color and text. It was roughly a decade early. visualAI is the version of that thesis with the model maturity and data plane to actually ship, and is the subject of a 34-claim pending patent.

The unusual part is that this time he wrote it. Trained as a chemical engineer and never employed as a software engineer, he built visualAI's production stack himself alongside Claude over 16 months: an AI search and retrieval engine deployed on GCP, layer on Google Vertex AI, scheduled pipelines on Cloud Run, a public REST API and an MCP server.

He speaks on commerce discovery architecture, multimodal retrieval, solo entrepreneurship, and AI-native development best practices.