Now, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup has $100 million in new funding to explore that idea, according to an announcement on its blog Wednesday (July 1).
“Five years ago, we began with a simple observation: The world does not happen in text. It happens in motion,” Co-Founder and CEO Jae Lee wrote.
In an interview with Bloomberg News, Lee expanded on that idea, saying video “is the most similar signal data that we receive as humans to learn about the world.”
“That’s different from even the latest frontier models such as Fable 5 and Mythos which are still language models,” he added.
While the last decade of AI “made text programmable,” the blog post continued, video has yet to enjoy a similar moment.
“The world’s video is still mostly dark matter to machines,” Lee said, noting that it sits in places like “archives … drones, and satellites,” mostly still accessed “through filenames, folders, captions, transcripts, and human memory.”
He added, “The richest record of reality is still largely outside the semantic layer that modern AI systems use. We are changing that. Our goal is to make every second of video addressable, searchable, and usable by agents.”
Twelve Labs’ Series B round was led by NEA and NAVER Ventures, with participation from Amazon, alongside Radical Ventures, Korea Investment Partners, Index Ventures, Quadrille Capital and Red Bull Ventures.
PYMNTS wrote earlier this year that video generators were part of a new generation of consumer software categories forming around AI.
“From AI companions and conversational search to prompt-based coding tools and video generators, products that barely appeared on app roadmaps two years ago are now attracting millions of users and building their own subscription economies,” that report said.
The report cites the example of AI companion app Character.AI, video editor CapCut, and Canva’s Magic Suite of AI products.
“These are not startups. They are established products that have been effectively rebuilt around AI capabilities. But running alongside them in the rankings is a separate tier: tools that could not exist without generative AI as their foundation,” the report added.
“AI-native search products like Perplexity. Video generation platforms. Coding assistants. Companion apps. Each represents a category that barely registered on product roadmaps in 2023 and now commands its own user communities, retention dynamics and, in many cases, subscription revenue.”
