Twelve Labs, a South Korean generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup, announced Friday that it has secured a combined US$10 million from U.S. chip design company Nvidia Corp., U.S. chipmaker Intel Corp., Samsung Next, the corporate venture capital unit of Korean chip giant Samsung Electronics Co., and local equity fund Korean Investment Partners. This marks Nvidia’s first direct investment into a Korean AI startup.
The startup has developed hyperscale AI models that are capable of understanding various types of information in video, including text, logos, conversation, and objective behavior. Mohamed Siddeek, head of NVentures at Nvidia, commented that “What Twelve Labs has accomplished technically is impressive. Anyone who understands the complexities associated with summarizing video will appreciate this leap forward.” He added that Nvidia believes Twelve Labs is an exciting AI company and looks forward to working with the team on numerous projects in the future.
The breakdown of the investment by the four companies was not disclosed. Twelve Labs stated that this investment will help them to secure a leading position in the generative AI market through close partnerships with global top-tier chipmakers. The startup had previously raised $17 million from global venture capital firms, including Index Ventures, in a seed round in December 2020.
Twelve Labs was founded in 2021, and is based in both Seoul and San Francisco. It aims to create an infrastructure for multimodal video understanding and help developers build programs that can see, listen, and understand the world as humans do. World-renowned AI scholar Fei-Fei Li, who teaches at Stanford University, and Aidan Gomez, chief executive and co-founder of the AI foundation model company Cohere, advise the Korean startup.
This image provided by Twelve Labs shows the generative AI startup's logo and promotional language about its AI technologies. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap)
This file photo provided by Twelve Labos shows the company's logo. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap)