Twelve Labs earns $50 Million Series A

Video analysis company Twelve Labs announced it raised $50 million in Series A funding to “fuel the ongoing development of its industry-leading foundation models dedicated to all aspects of video.” The round was co-led by new investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, which recently participated in Twelve Labs’ strategic round in 2023. Previous investors, including Index Ventures, Radical Ventures, WndrCo, and Korea Investment Partners also joined the round. In addition to R&D, funds will be used to nearly double the headcount, with plans to add more than 50 employees by the end of the year.

Twelve Labs won the “Best Technology Award” at the Visual 1st conference in 2022.

Twelve Labs has integrated several NVIDIA frameworks and services within its platform, including the NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU and NVIDIA L40S GPU, as well as inference frameworks such as NVIDIA Triton Inference Server and NVIDIA TensorRT. These technologies have enabled Twelve Labs to develop first-of-their-kind foundation models for multimodal video understanding. Twelve Labs is also exploring product and research collaborations with NVIDIA to bring best-in-class multimodal foundation models and enabling frameworks to market.

Customers and partners have been captivated by Twelve Labs’ technology. Since debuting its platform, Twelve Labs has 30,000 users that are utilizing its APIs for tasks such as semantic video search and summarization across notable organizations in sports, media and entertainment, advertising, automotive, and security. In doing so, the company has started establishing deep industry partnerships and integrations with companies like Vidispine, EMAM, Blackbird, and more.

“We believe the future is multimodal, and Twelve Labs is leading the charge in terms of figuring out how to make multimodal AI efficient, purposeful, and enterprise grade,” said Tiffany Luck, Partner at NEA and new Twelve Labs board member. “The company has brought together an incredibly talented team from across the globe to solve one of the most complex and exciting problems in AI. Twelve Labs is building the future of video understanding and multimodal AI, and we’re excited to support them as they execute their vision and positively impact our world.”

“As a core component of generative AI, multimodal video understanding is a key to delivering more robust LLMs across industries,” said Mohamed “Sid” Siddeek, corporate vice president and head of NVentures. “The world-class team at Twelve Labs is leveraging NVIDIA accelerated computing together with their incredible capacity for video understanding, leading to new ways for enterprise customers to take advantage of generative AI.”