Twelve Labs Inc. has raised $100 million in a Series B round backed by Amazon.com Inc., NEA Management Co, Naver Ventures, Radical Ventures, Index Ventures, Korea Investment Partners and others.
The Nvidia-backed startup said AWS will host workloads on its Trainium chips under a multi-year agreement, providing a new model for developers building AI applications.
The San Francisco-based company was founded by a Korean-born engineer and develops AI that makes videos searchable and understandable. CEO Jae Lee said the company believes video is the data type that best reflects how humans learn and is an important frontier for artificial intelligence.
Twelve Labs argues that since video accounts for approximately 90% of the world’s data, monetizing and analyzing vast archives remains difficult. The technology uses a multimodal model that processes visual, audio, and audio signals together. Marengo 3.0 transforms raw footage into a searchable representation, and Pegasus 1.5 structures that information into machine-readable data for AI applications.
The platform allows users to find specific moments within a large archive, such as the taxi scene from Marlon Brando’s On the Waterfront or Diego Maradona’s Hand of God goal. The company is also building a video agent that can search, describe, plan, and execute tasks from text prompts.
