When You See the Same Future: How We As Web and Cortave Started Building Together

Some partnerships start with a carefully mapped-out business case.

This one started with an introduction, a gaming chair, and two people realizing very quickly that they’d been thinking about many of the same things.

When a mutual connection introduced Mike Danforth, Cortave’s CEO, to Robert Pop, Chief AI Officer at We As Web, there was no long process of figuring out whether the two companies might have something to talk about.

According to Mike, it took about two minutes. Admittedly, there was an unusual icebreaker.

Mike recognized Robert’s Secretlab chair and immediately knew he was talking to another PC gamer. What started as a small personal connection quickly turned into something considerably more relevant: once the conversation moved to AI, they discovered they’d independently been questioning many of the same assumptions about where the market was heading.

And that became the beginning of the relationship between Cortave and We As Web.

Looking beyond the AI rush

At the time, much of the technology conversation was centered around what AI could suddenly do. New models. Agents. Automation. New tools appearing almost daily.

Mike and Robert’s conversations looked slightly further ahead.

• What happens when experimentation becomes infrastructure?
• Who owns AI inside an organization?
• How do companies know which AI applications are genuinely useful?
• How do they understand what they’re spending?
• And, as more AI becomes embedded into everyday operations, how do they govern and secure an increasingly complex environment?

Mike remembers those early conversations because many of the things they were discussing weren’t yet dominating the wider market conversation.

“We very quickly aligned on thought leadership and conversation angles that the rest of the market wasn’t even talking about or considering.”

Mike Danforth, CEO, Cortave

They talked about the limitations of the agent hype. They discussed companies eventually moving from experimentation toward accountability. About governance and security becoming much bigger concerns. They also discussed organizations beginning to rethink the balance between buying software and building technology specifically around their own needs.

Months later, many of those conversations are becoming considerably more familiar across the industry.

For both sides, that early alignment mattered.

Not because agreeing about the future automatically creates a partnership, but because it gave Cortave and We As Web a shared starting point for figuring out what each could contribute to it.

Different pieces of the same problem

Cortave and We As Web don’t do the same thing. That’s precisely the point.

Cortave is building the underlying layer that helps organizations understand and manage increasingly complex AI environments — bringing visibility across different models, applications and systems rather than being tied to one particular platform.

Its focus spans five areas that Mike sees becoming increasingly important as enterprise AI matures: observability, governance, centralized context, cost optimization and sustainability.

We As Web approaches the same landscape from another direction.

With engineering teams across multiple markets and a growing focus on AI, our role is much closer to the building itself: developing the applications, platforms and infrastructure companies need as AI becomes part of their core technology environment.

One side helps create visibility across that environment. The other can build within it.

And rather than expanding both organizations until they eventually replicate one another’s capabilities, the more interesting question became: what if we simply build together?

From shared thinking to shared work

The relationship didn’t remain theoretical for long.

Cortave’s technology has already become part of work happening within We As Web, with Robert testing and building on the platform as Cortave itself continues to develop it.

At the same time, conversations have started moving in both directions.

When Cortave identifies an opportunity requiring significant engineering or custom development, We As Web can become part of the conversation. When We As Web encounters a challenge where Cortave’s AI operations capabilities make sense, that door can open in the opposite direction.

Mike describes the model as a flywheel.

Instead of every technology company trying to build every possible capability internally, you create a network of specialists that becomes stronger as those capabilities connect.

• For Cortave, that means not needing to become a large software engineering services company.
• For We As Web, it means not rebuilding technology that a specialist partner has already spent its time solving.
• For the companies we work with, it means bringing the right expertise into the room rather than forcing every problem through the same solution.

A different idea of partnership

There’s a tendency in technology to describe partnerships in terms of portfolios.

Software vendors. Service providers. Distributors. Technology partners.

Mike sees something different becoming increasingly valuable: a smaller ecosystem in which companies understand each other’s strengths well enough to know when to bring one another in.

It’s an idea that feels familiar at We As Web.

It’s also part of the thinking behind our involvement in CUBE, the joint venture that brings together eight technology companies with complementary capabilities.

The premise is simple: another company’s strength doesn’t necessarily have to be your competition. Sometimes it’s the missing piece.

That same thinking is now taking shape between Cortave and We As Web. Not because the two companies offer identical capabilities, but because they don’t.

The human layer still matters

There is a certain irony in the fact that a partnership centered so heavily around AI has reinforced something decidedly human.

As technology makes it easier to automate outreach, generate content and contact thousands of people at once, Mike sees genuine relationships becoming more — not less — important.

Getting through the noise is harder. Trust matters more. Knowing the person who can solve the part of a problem you can’t solve yourself matters more.

And sometimes a meaningful business relationship still starts in an unexpectedly simple way: someone makes an introduction, two people start talking and realize they see the same opportunity from different sides.

The gaming chair probably helped.

But the conversations that followed are what turned that introduction into something we’re now building on.

And we’re still very much at the beginning.