The startup Twelve Labs, which specializes in developing artificial intelligence (AI) for video, announced on the 13th that it has secured $30 million (approximately 43 billion KRW) in strategic investment. This investment involved companies like SK Telecom, Snowflake, Databricks, HubSpot Ventures, and In-Q-Tel. As a result, the company has accumulated a total of $107 million (approximately 153 billion KRW) in investments.
Founded by CEO Jae Sung Lee in San Francisco in 2021, the company develops video-specialized AIs such as “Pegasus” and “Marengo.” Pegasus is an AI that summarizes videos into text and creates highlights of key scenes, allowing users to understand the content without watching the entire video. Marengo, on the other hand, is a multimodal AI that can find desired scenes within a video. Multimodal AI can recognize not only text but also images, videos, and sounds. For instance, if you input a request to find scoring moments in a soccer match video, it will show the desired scenes.
Pegasus and Marengo interact with each other. A representative from the company stated, “You can find specific scenes through Marengo and create highlights with Pegasus,” emphasizing the interconnectivity of the two AIs.
Due to these advantages, major professional sports associations, film production companies, and international broadcasting companies are using the company’s AI. Cloud company Snowflake and Databricks, which provides various data management solutions, plan to integrate the company’s AI to offer video management features.
SK Telecom also plans to collaborate with the company to develop next-generation AI services that understand videos. They will jointly develop AI agents specialized in specific fields, manage numerous CCTV systems with ease, and create an AI control system capable of video analysis using Twelve Labs’ technology. Additionally, Twelve Labs will join SK Telecom’s AI consortium, the “K-AI Alliance,” to collaborate with other companies. Twelve Labs CEO Jae Sung Lee emphasized, “Through this investment and cooperation, we aim to advance AI developments in the video field.”