Twelve Labs, a video-understanding AI startup founded by Korean engineers, has closed a $100 million Series B round from investors including Amazon, NEA and Naver Ventures, Bloomberg reported on July 1. Total funding now exceeds $200 million, and the company signed a multiyear agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run its models on Amazon's in-house Trainium chips. A five-year-old startup with half its workforce in Seoul has become a strategic partner of the world's largest cloud provider.
Behind the deal lies a structural gap in the AI industry. Roughly 90 percent of the world's data exists as video, yet most of it sits idle, accessible only through filenames, folders, captions and human memory. Text-centric large language models handle video poorly: they sample a handful of frames and lose context, or must re-scan footage from scratch with every new question. That is why millions of hours of archives held by studios, broadcasters and sports franchises remain unmonetized. As video understanding is redefined as essential infrastructure for search, advertising and AI agents, capital has begun flowing to the companies positioned to fill this gap.
Deal Structure: NEA and Naver Co-Lead, Amazon Adds a Chip Alliance