Twelve Labs secures $12 mn for AI-powered video analysis platform

Twelve Labs Inc., a South Korean artificial intelligence-powered video search platform developer, closed its seed extension round with an additional $12 million on Dec. 6. Including a $5 million investment in March, it has attracted $17 million in the seed funding round.

The extension round was led by Radical Ventures, a Toronto-based venture capital firm specializing in AI and healthcare.

Index Ventures, which led the funding in March, participated alongside WndrCo, led by DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Spring Ventures, led by former Nike Korea General Manager David Song.

Twelve Labs is set to commercialize a multi-billion parameter-scale AI model that understands video images. Beyond content searching, the AI model classifies, summarizes and recommends videos as humans do.

Through a partnership with global software giant Oracle, the startup will train the AI model by using hundreds of graphic processing units (GPUs) on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Twelve Labs is also recruiting AI research and development professionals from its Seoul headquarters and its San Francisco office.

The startup’s project is significantly meaningful as the large-scale AI model development has a high entry barrier due to enormous amounts of capital and data, the two-year-old startup said.

In Korea, the large players in such areas are conglomerates like Samsung Group and SK Group and big tech firms including Naver Corp. and Kakao Corp.

Write to Da-Eun Choi at max@hankyung.com
Jihyun Kim edited this article.