SK Telecom invests $3 mn in AI-powered video analysis startup Twelve Labs

South Korea’s top mobile carrier SK Telecom Co. said on Friday it will invest $3 million in Twelve Labs Inc., a Korean AI-powered video analysis startup, to use the startup’s technology in its AI agent services.

Founded in 2021 in San Francisco, Twelve Labs develops AI-based multimodal video understanding and search technologies.

The startup is known for attracting $50 million in a Series A funding round led by global chip designer Nvidia Corp. in June.

Nvidia's venture capital affiliate NVentures and New Enterprise Associates, a new investor in Twelve Labs, jointly led the Series A round. Existing global investors including Index Ventures, Radical Ventures and WndrCo, led by DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Seoul-based Korea Investment Partners also joined the round.

The existing investors participated in pre-Series A funding of about $10 million last October, in which Nvidia made its first investment in a Korean generative AI startup.

SK TELECOM’S AI AGENT

Through the investment, SKT expects to enhance AI Agent, an AI butler service, by merging the two companies’ AI expertise.

The two companies also agreed to join forces to develop technologies for implementing multimodal AI in security and public safety applications, such as AI surveillance systems.

Unlike traditional surveillance systems in which a single operator had to monitor numerous CCTV feeds for many hours, Twelve Labs' multimodal AI model enables rapid searching and summarizing of key incidents, movements and individuals.

The two firms also plan to collaborate on developing technologies to apply multimodal AI to areas such as security and public safety, including AI monitoring systems.

SK Telecom said Twelve Labs will join the K-AI Alliance, a group of Korean companies promoting AI technology, to collaborate with other members in fostering Korea’s AI ecosystem.

“Through the partnership with SKT, we look forward to providing our video foundation models to various industry use cases and provide real value in daily workflows in the ecosystem,” said Jae Lee, CEO of Twelve Labs.

Lee Jae-shin, head of AI Growth Strategy at SK Telecom, said: “Through the cooperation of the two companies, we will further strengthen our competitiveness in the multimodal AI field.”

TWELVE LABS’ AI TECH

Multimodal AI is used as a machine learning model, in which various types of data including image, text, speech and numbers are combined with intelligence processing algorithms to yield sophisticated and accurate outputs.

Based on the multimodal model, Twelve Labs analyzes images and sounds in a video and matches them to human language. The model can also create text based on the video content, edit a short-form video and categorize videos according to a certain standard. 

The technology boosts the efficiency of creating YouTube Shorts, setting up advertising strategies for videos and even finding missing persons by analyzing closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage, according to the startup.

Twelve Labs has integrated some of Nvidia's framework and services within its platform, including the NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core Graphic Processing Unit and NVIDIA L40S GPU, to improve its video understanding technology. 

In March, Twelve Labs released the multimodal model Marengo-2.6, which enables various video, text, image and audio search tasks. It also launched a beta version of Pegasus-1, which is designed to understand and articulate video content.

Write to Seung-Woo Lee at leeswoo@hankyung.com
In-Soo Nam edited this article.