Twelvelabs, a video analysis artificial intelligence (AI) company, said Tuesday it has completed a Series B funding round worth $100 million (about 150 billion won).
The round was co-led by NEA and Naver Ventures. Amazon participated as a major investor. Existing investors including Radical Ventures, Korea Investment Partners and Index Ventures also made follow-on investments. New investors such as Quadrille Capital and Red Bull Ventures joined the round. As a result, Twelvelabs' cumulative funding was tallied at more than $200 million (about 300 billion won).
Twelvelabs was founded in 2021 by CEO Jae Lee in Silicon Valley in the United States. Its flagship products are "Marengo," an AI model that analyzes scenes or sounds in videos to search data, and "Pegasus," which converts the scenes analyzed by Marengo into text. The company will use the newly secured funds to begin developing a video superintelligence model. In particular, the company aims to build a video cognition system that integrates perception, memory and reasoning, going beyond existing video understanding models.
With Amazon's strategic investment, Twelvelabs has gained momentum to expand its business in the cloud infrastructure market. The investment further strengthens the strategic partnership between Twelvelabs and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Twelvelabs has selected AWS as its top-priority cloud provider and decided to optimize video inference to run efficiently on "Trainium," an AI chip developed by AWS itself. The company will also debut its upcoming video foundation models on AWS first.
Jason Bennett, AWS Global Vice President for Startups and Venture Capital (VC), said, "Twelvelabs has expanded the limits of what AI can perceive and reason about from its early days. We are pleased to continue this journey of scaling large-scale video cognition systems on AWS infrastructure, including Trainium chips."
CEO Lee said, "Using this investment as a stepping stone, we will move beyond being a foundation model company to complete a comprehensive video cognition system for all players, including developers, general users, enterprises and agents."
