San Francisco Video Search Startup Raises $100 Million From Amazon And Vcs

Twelve Labs Co. is raising $100 cardinal from investors including Amazon.com Inc., NEA Management Co. and Naver Ventures, boosting its efforts to create artificial intelligence that tin quickly hunt and analyse troves of video.

The Nvidia Corp.-backed startup’s Series B information was co-led by NEA and Naver pinch information from Radical Ventures, Index Ventures, Korea Investment Partners Co. and others, it said successful a statement. Amazon’s unreality work AWS signed a multiyear statement to big nan venture’s workloads connected Trainium chips, pinch caller models debuting connected nan work for developers building AI applications, it added.

Founded by Korean-born engineers and headquartered successful San Francisco, Twelve Labs is processing AI models that tin make video searchable and understandable, pinch nan purpose of accessing immense archives of footage and make them easier to monetize.

“Five years ago, we made a contrarian stake that video, and not text, is nan astir akin awesome information that we person arsenic humans to study astir nan world,” said Jae Lee, main executive serviceman and Twelve Labs co-founder. “That’s different from moreover nan latest frontier models specified arsenic Fable 5 and Mythos which are still connection models,” he told Bloomberg News connected a video call.

Video accounts for astir 90% of nan world’s data, yet astir sits idle successful archives, excessively dense and unstructured to query aliases analyse astatine scale. Large connection models tin laboriously sample frames but miss content. To hole this, Twelve Labs built models that tin process aggregate types of information simultaneously.

Its flagship Marengo 3.0 exemplary converts earthy footage truthful that machines tin hunt crossed sound, reside and motion. The company’s Pegasus 1.5 exemplary past structures that output into information parsable for AI devices aliases applications, akin to markup languages that make documents searchable for browsers. Together they shape a stack of each videos they’ve ingested, pinch nan purpose of raising hunt accuracy complete time.

Creators and intermezo companies put their video archives into a searchable system. That makes it easier to find circumstantial scenes, specified arsenic Marlon Brando’s taxi segment successful nan 1954 movie On nan Waterfront aliases Diego Maradona’s contentious “Hand of God” extremity successful nan 1986 World Cup.

Twelve Labs is besides building video agents that tin search, explain, scheme and execute via matter commands. “We haven’t named our video agents yet,” said Lee, whose squad of astir 200 is evenly divided betwixt Seoul and San Francisco.

Video contains an tremendous magnitude of accusation — from broadcasts, films, meetings, factories, hospitals, stadiums, drones and satellites — but astir of it is still accessed done filenames, folders, captions, transcripts and quality memory. “Our extremity is to make each 2nd of video addressable, searchable and usable by agents,” Lee said.

Customers see Hollywood studios pinch millions of hours of archival content, advertizing companies, societal media influencers and sports franchise owners, according to nan startup. The database includes Toronto Raptors proprietor Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd., AMC Global Media Inc. and UNICEF.

Rai writes for Bloomberg.