Twelve Labs, a San Francisco, CA-based self-serve SaaS platform where content creators upload their video files to make them searchable, announced that it closed $12 million in seed extension.
The round was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Index Ventures, WndrCo, Spring Ventures, Weights & Biases CEO Lukas Biewald, and others.
The startup plans to invest in building out its tech and expanding its team.
“The vision of Twelve Labs is to help developers build programs that can see, listen, and understand the world as we do by giving them the most powerful video understanding infrastructure,” Jae Lee, co-founder, and CEO of Twelve Labs, said. “As a part of achieving the company’s vision to help developers create intelligent video applications, the Twelve Labs team is building ‘foundation models’ for multimodal video understanding,”
Twelve Labs, which is currently in closed beta, uses AI to attempt to extract “rich information” from videos such as movement and actions, objects and people, sound, text on screen, and speech to identify the relationships between them.
Twelve Labs has a multiyear contract with Oracle to train AI models using Oracle’s cloud infrastructure.
Company: Twelve Labs, Inc.
Raised: $12.0M
Round: Seed Round Extension
Funding Month: December 2022
Lead Investors: Radical Ventures
Additional Investors: Index Ventures, WndrCo, Spring Ventures, and Lukas Biewald
Company Website: https://twelvelabs.io/
Software Category: AI-powered Video Search Platform
About the Company: Twelve Labs is building large visual language models (VLMs) for video understanding. It built a cloud service for video search and understanding to help developers build programs that can see, listen, and understand the world. Twelve Labs’ platform views and understands the content of a video, including both visual (action, movement, objects, text, etc.) and audio (non-verbal and conversational) context. It then transforms the video content into a powerful intermediary data format (vectors), so that when a user types in a search query, the Twelve Labs AI automatically outputs the most relevant scenes across hundreds of thousands of hours of video. By leveraging a Twelve Labs platform, any organization can leverage powerful video understanding capabilities with just a few intuitive API calls.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/05/twelve-labs-lands-12m-for-ai-that-understands-the-context-of-videos/