Twelve Labs bets video is AI's foundation; $100M Series B with Amazon and Nvidia

Twelve Labs builds video-understanding foundation models — Marengo (index/retrieval) and Pegasus (video-language reasoning) — sold via API and Amazon Bedrock to enterprises searching and analyzing large video archives.

Video, not language, will be the foundation of AI: native video models (Marengo, Pegasus) let machines watch, remember and reason over footage like humans.

Founded in 2021 in San Francisco by five Koreans led by Jae Lee, with core AI research done in Seoul. The founding observation: 'the world does not happen in text. It happens in motion.' Seed funding reached about $17M, and in October 2023 Nvidia made its first investment in a Korean generative-AI startup, backing a roughly $10M pre-Series A.

June 2024: a $50M Series A co-led by Nvidia's NVentures and NEA, joined by Index Ventures, Radical Ventures, WndrCo and Korea Investment Partners. Products matured fast: Marengo-2.6 shipped in March 2024 for any-to-any video search, Pegasus-1 went to beta for video-language reasoning. December 2024: SK Telecom invested $3M to use the models in its AI agent and surveillance work. In July 2025 Amazon made Marengo 2.7 and Pegasus 1.2 fully managed in Bedrock; by 2026 GS Shop's video recommendation built on the models doubled click-through and raised purchase intent 9x, and U.S. government agencies were exploring video intelligence for defense and public safety.

Still running and scaling: a $100M Series B announced 2026-07-01 (Naver Ventures and NEA co-led, Amazon participating) brought total funding past $207M. CEO Jae Lee says the goal is 'video superintelligence' — AI that watches, remembers and reasons like humans — with New York and London offices planned and a first AI video-creation app, Rodeo, in preview.

Twelve Labs chose video as the primary data type — not a second modality — arguing that text is a lossy compression of reality and causality lives in sequence.

The architecture made video machine-readable memory: footage is understood once, stored durably, and addressable to the exact second — what enterprises with huge archives actually need.

Nvidia's 2023 investment was the first validation and the wedge: it signaled the bet was credible before the models shipped, and three years of collaboration led to the Series B.

Commercial proof came from a narrow set — GS Shop's doubled click-through and 9x purchase intent — showing the platform could monetize before 'video superintelligence' arrived.

Betting on a modality most of AI ignored — video instead of text — pulled in Nvidia and Amazon as backers; the contrarian bet must still convert into enterprise revenue to compound.

As of 2026-09-02 Twelve Labs has raised more than $207M: the July 2026 Series B ($100M, co-led by Naver Ventures and NEA with Amazon) funds Marengo, Pegasus and its Video Cognition System. Enterprise revenue is concentrated in the U.S. and Europe, developer revenue grows 80–120% annually, adopters include GS Shop and U.S. agencies, and its models run fully managed in Amazon Bedrock. It plans New York and London offices, previewed its video-creation app Rodeo, and keeps pushing Korean-built video models as leaders of the emerging video-intelligence era.