Twelve Million for Video Intell Firm Twelve Labs

In San Francisco, video analytics company Twelve Labs has closed a $12m seed extension funding round, for use in adding product features, continuing R&D, and for further development of its foundation model for video understanding.

Twelve Labs' platform views and 'understands' the content of a video, including both visual context (including action, movement, objects and text) and audio (non-verbal and conversational). Video content is then transformed into an intermediate data format known as vectors, allowing users to enter search queries and return the most relevant scenes from hundreds of thousands of hours of video in less than one second. The product was launched to a small group of users last spring and has now secured closed beta customers building on its APIs for a broad range of use cases including enterprise knowledge bases, content moderation, media analytics, contextual advertising and e-learning.

The foundation model will be developed to tackle video-related tasks extending beyond semantic search, including video chapterization and summary generation.

The funding extension brings the total value of the seed round to $17m and was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from existing investors including early seed lead Index Ventures; and new investors including Jeffrey Katzenberg's WndrCo and Spring Ventures, plus angel investors.

Twelve Labs co-founder and CEO Jae Lee comments: 'This is a very exciting time for Twelve Labs and the entire AI industry. We are deeply appreciative of the strong support from our early customers and investors, as well as from our cloud partner, Oracle. With our powerful foundation model for video, we are well positioned to advance video understanding and to unlock the full potential of video and creativity'.

Web site: www.twelvelabs.io .


Video intelligence is flagged up as a key development for the next few years by Ipsos SIA's Sandro Kaulartz, in MrWeb's Data Viz supplement, just published.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.