Video understanding company Twelve Labs announced that three of the world’s leading infrastructure providers, Databricks, SK Telecom, Snowflake Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, and In-Q-Tel (IQT), have each made a significant strategic investment in the company. The $30 million in funding validates the value Twelve Labs delivers to end customers, particularly in the media and entertainment space.
These include professional sports leagues, major film and production studios, the world’s largest content creators and developers, and other businesses that utilize large stores of video content.
This funding news comes after the company released its latest video foundation model, Marengo 2.7. This model applies a new multi-vector approach to video understanding, yielding unprecedented results.
Twelve Labs will use the latest funding to accelerate the development of key initiatives. And the company continues to grow aggressively to meet customer demand and further its R&D efforts. Twelve Labs provides video AI-based solutions designed to unlock the full potential of vast enterprise video archives. And its proprietary multimodal foundation models, Marengo and Pegasus, bring human-like understanding to videos, enabling precise semantic search, summarization, analysis, Q&A, etc.
As part of their respective investments, Databricks and Snowflake will deliver Twelve Labs’ capabilities to users through interoperability with their vector databases. And this represents an essential milestone in the AI ecosystem, validating the value end customers experience with Twelve Labs.
Snowflake is developing an advanced integration with Twelve Labs that will utilize Snowflake Cortex AI, Snowflake’s fully managed AI service. This service provides a suite of generative AI features that can be leveraged to improve the consumer experience, drive monetization through enhanced content analysis, and enhance personalization and creative visioning with enhanced video and creative search capabilities. Twelve Labs’ multimodal video embeddings can be stored in Snowflake with vector data support, enabling advanced video analytics and AI-driven applications, all with Snowflake AI Data Cloud’s built-in security and governance.
Twelve Labs and Databricks created an integration that explicitly reduces development time and resource needs for advanced video applications, enabling complex queries across vast video libraries and enhancing overall workflow efficiency. And through a unified approach to handling multimodal data, users no longer have to juggle separate models for text, image, and audio analysis.
Instead, they can work with a single and coherent representation that captures the essence of video content. This simplifies deployment architecture and enables more nuanced and context-aware applications, from sophisticated content recommendation systems to advanced video search engines and automated content moderation tools.
This integration extends the capabilities of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and benefits the Databricks ecosystem, enabling seamless incorporation of video understanding into existing data pipelines and machine learning workflows. Whether companies can develop real-time video analytics, build large-scale content classification systems, or explore novel applications in Generative AI, this combined solution provides a powerful foundation. And it pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in video AI, opening up new avenues for innovation and problem-solving.
Upon the closing of this latest funding round and amid exceptional growth and product demand, Twelve Labs hired Yoon Kim as President and Chief Strategy Officer. Dr. Kim had most recently served as a Partner at Saehan Ventures, where he was in charge of discovering and fostering promising AI and deep tech startups.
Before that, he was CTO at SK Telecom, leading AI innovation. However, Dr. Kim is best known for his pivotal role in developing Apple’s AI assistant, Siri. He joined Apple in 2013 by acquiring Novauris Technologies, a pioneer in mobile speech recognition, where he served as CEO. At Apple, he led teams that build speech recognition technologies for Siri and iOS dictation.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re incredibly excited to partner closely with leading data platforms. It’s a no-brainer for us to bring our video foundation models to the largest and most trusted enterprise infrastructure providers. This is just the beginning. Today we have interoperability with their leading vector databases and we’re looking forward to building out the next generation of AI tooling within these platforms.”
– Jae Lee, CEO of Twelve Labs
“In working with Twelve Labs and our media, sports and advertising customers, there is a strong opportunity to leverage the company’s models for advanced video search, creative versioning and video personalization. Our investment will unlock even more opportunity for our customers to leverage AI without copying or moving their data and Twelve Labs and Snowflake are committed to solutions that are privacy focused and respect our customers’ intellectual property.”
– Bill Stratton, Global Head of Media, Entertainment & Advertising at Snowflake
“Twelve Labs’ technology is highly advanced and fills an important gap in the current AI ecosystem. We are excited to back the company building the future of video understanding and are already working on projects that will up-level customer capabilities. Integrating Twelve Labs Embed API with our Mosaic AI Vector Search overcomes the challenge of efficient processing of large-scale video datasets and accurate multimodal content representation. Our work together will help deliver on the promise of data intelligence, and we look forward to enabling additional integrations in the future.”
– Andrew Ferguson, VP of Databricks Ventures
“While it is unusual for a company of Twelve Labs’ age and stage to hire a President, this move is a testament to the demand we have experienced and the path we see moving forward. Yoon is the right person to help us execute. Yoon will be instrumental in driving future growth with key acquisitions, expanding our global presence, and aligning our teams toward ambitious goals. He will also give us a unique talent advantage in South Korea.”
– Jae Lee, CEO and co-founder of Twelve Labs
“Twelve Labs not only possesses world-class multimodal AI technology, but also has an outstanding ability to create real-world value for its customers through rapid innovations. I believe Twelve Labs is on the verge of establishing clear and sustainable leadership in video understanding AI. Based on my experience as both an entrepreneur and executive in the US, UK and Korea, I’m looking forward to working with global partners in fulfilling our mission of enabling humans and machines to understand all video content in the world and recruiting the best AI talent to join our cause.”
– Dr. Kim
