Twelve Labs
Video AI Understanding
- Valuation
- ~$400M(Series B, 2024)
- Total Funding
- $77M
About Twelve Labs
Twelve Labs builds multimodal video understanding AI that can search, analyze, and extract information from video content semantically — not just via transcription. Its Marengo and Pegasus model families enable developers to build apps that understand what happens in video, who appears, what is said, and the mood or context, all through a developer-friendly API.
Company History
Twelve Labs was founded in 2021 by Jae Lee and Hyeonwoo Noh with the mission of teaching machines to understand video the way humans do. Unlike earlier video AI that relied on audio transcription or frame-by-frame image classification, Twelve Labs built multimodal models that understand the interplay of visuals, audio, text, and motion. NVIDIA led the 2024 Series B, signalling strong hardware-software integration interest.
Company Timeline
4 milestones- 2021Founded; accepted into Y Combinator
- Mar 2023Series A: $17M
- Jun 2024Series B: $50M led by NVIDIA and Intel Capital
- 2024Pegasus 1.2 launched — native video-to-text generation; 1,000+ developer customers
Products & Services
4- Marengo (video search & embeddings)
- Pegasus (video-to-text generation)
- Twelve Labs API
- Indexes (video vector store)
People & ecosystem
Key People
- Jae Lee (CEO & Co-founder)
- Hyeonwoo Noh (CTO & Co-founder)
Key Investors
- NVIDIA
- Intel Capital
- Kleiner Perkins
- Index Ventures
- Samsung Next
Competitive Landscape
- runway-ml
- google-deepmind
- pika-labs