Twelve Labs Co. is raising $100 million from investors including Amazon.com Inc., NEA Management Co. and Naver Ventures, boosting its efforts to develop artificial intelligence that can quickly search and analyze troves of video.<\/p>\n
The Nvidia Corp.-backed startup\u2019s Series B round was co-led by NEA and Naver with participation from Radical Ventures, Index Ventures, Korea Investment Partners Co. and others, it said in a statement. Amazon\u2019s cloud service AWS signed a multiyear contract to host the venture\u2019s workloads on Trainium chips, with new models debuting on the service for developers building AI applications, it added.<\/p>\n
Founded by Korean-born engineers and headquartered in San Francisco, Twelve Labs is developing AI models that can make video searchable and understandable, with the aim of accessing vast archives of footage and make them easier to monetize.<\/p>\n
\u201cFive years ago, we made a contrarian bet that video, and not text, is the most similar signal data that we receive as humans to learn about the world,\u201d said Jae Lee, chief executive officer and Twelve Labs co-founder. \u201cThat\u2019s different from even the latest frontier models such as Fable 5 and Mythos which are still language models,\u201d he told Bloomberg News on a video call.<\/p>\n
Video accounts for about 90% of the world\u2019s data, yet most sits idle in archives, too dense and unstructured to query or analyze at scale. Large language models can laboriously sample frames but miss content. To fix this, Twelve Labs built models that can process multiple types of data simultaneously.<\/p>\n
Its flagship Marengo 3.0 model converts raw footage so that machines can search across sound, speech and motion. The company\u2019s Pegasus 1.5 model then structures that output into data parsable for AI tools or applications, similar to markup languages that make documents searchable for browsers. Together they form a stack of all videos they\u2019ve ingested, with the aim of raising search accuracy over time.<\/p>\n
Creators and entertainment companies put their video archives into a searchable system. That makes it easier to find specific scenes, such as Marlon Brando\u2019s taxi scene in the 1954 film On the Waterfront or Diego Maradona\u2019s contentious \u201cHand of God\u201d goal in the 1986 World Cup.<\/p>\n
Twelve Labs is also building video agents that can search, explain, plan and execute via text commands. \u201cWe haven\u2019t named our video agents yet,\u201d said Lee, whose team of around 200 is evenly split between Seoul and San Francisco. <\/p>\n
Video contains an enormous amount of information \u2014 from broadcasts, films, meetings, factories, hospitals, stadiums, drones and satellites \u2014 but most of it is still accessed through filenames, folders, captions, transcripts and human memory. \u201cOur goal is to make every second of video addressable, searchable and usable by agents,\u201d Lee said.<\/p>\n
Customers include Hollywood studios with millions of hours of archival content, advertising companies, social media influencers and sports franchise owners, according to the startup. The list includes Toronto Raptors owner Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd., AMC Global Media Inc. and UNICEF.<\/p>\n
Rai writes for Bloomberg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twelve Labs Co. is raising $100 million from investors including Amazon.com Inc., NEA Management Co. and Naver Ventures,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":388169,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[41588,8487,1804,4562,3291,1924,2194,4679,156513,156515,101,103,102,104,106,105,156512,5050,156514,8074],"class_list":["post-388168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-ai-model","tag-amazon","tag-company","tag-content","tag-datum","tag-film","tag-goal","tag-human","tag-jae-lee","tag-naver-ventures","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-twelve-labs","tag-video","tag-video-agent","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/388169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}