Twelve Labs Secures $30M to Build Deeper, More Adaptable Video AI Solutions

Video content is exploding, but finding specific moments within videos often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. Jae Lee, the co-founder and CEO of Twelve Labs, recognized this challenge and built a company dedicated to solving it. Twelve Labs, a San Francisco-based startup, is pioneering video understanding AI, and its latest funding round—$30 million from key strategic investors—signals the industry’s confidence in its groundbreaking approach.

Nvidia backed Twelve Labs in building AI that understands videos like humans. Lee, the founder of Twelve Labs, mentioned that Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, always had a special place in his heart for computer vision, with video understanding being one of the first use cases powered by Nvidia chips. According to Lee, Nvidia's vision and expertise in video understanding made for a perfect match with Twelve Labs' mission.

The new investment round included heavyweights like Databricks, Snowflake Ventures, SK Telecom, HubSpot Ventures, and In-Q-Tel (IQT). This funding not only brings the company’s total raised to $107.1 million but also solidifies partnerships that promise to reshape enterprise video analytics.

At the heart of Twelve Labs’ innovation is its proprietary multimodal foundation models, Marengo and Pegasus. These models go beyond basic keyword searches, diving into the nuances of video content, from actions and objects to background sounds. Whether it’s precise semantic search, summarization, or automated content moderation, these tools bring human-like understanding to video data.