The artificial intelligence (AI) startup has raised $100 million in new funding to explore its ideas, according to a blog announcement on Wednesday (July 1).
“Five years ago, we started with a simple observation: The world doesn’t happen in words; it happens in movement,” writes co-founder and CEO Jee Lee.
In an interview with Bloomberg News, Lee expanded on that idea, saying that video is “the most analogous signal data that humans receive to learn about the world.”
“This is different from modern frontier models like Fable 5 and Mythos, which are still language models,” he added.
While AI over the past decade has “made text programmable,” the blog post continued, video has yet to enjoy a similar moment.
“The world’s video is still largely dark matter for machines,” Lee said, noting that video resides in places like “archives…on drones and satellites,” and that most of it is still accessed “through file names, folders, captions, transcripts, and human memory.”
He added: “The richest record of reality still resides mostly in the semantic layer used by modern AI systems. We’re changing that. Our goal is to make every second of video addressable, searchable, and available to agents.”
Twelve Labs’ Series B round was led by NEA and NAVER Ventures, with participation from Amazon, as well as Radical Ventures, Korea Investment Partners, Index Ventures, Quadrille Capital, and Red Bull Ventures.
PYMNTS wrote earlier this year that video generators are part of a new generation of consumer software categories forming around AI.
“From AI companions and conversational search to prompt-based coding tools and video generators, products that barely appeared on app roadmaps two years ago now attract millions of users and create their own subscription economies,” the report says.
The report cites examples of AI companion app Character.AI, video editor CapCut, and Canva’s Magic Suite of AI products.
“These are not startups. These are established products that have been effectively rebuilt around AI capabilities. But sitting alongside them in the rankings is another tier: tools that could not exist without generative AI as their foundation,” the report added.
“AI-native search products like Perplexity, video generation platforms, coding assistants, and companion apps—each represent categories that barely registered on 2023 product roadmaps, but now command their own user communities, retention, and, in many cases, subscription revenue.”
