NEA and NAVER Ventures lead the Series B funding round for TwelveLabs, the tech startup building AI tools to enable the search and tagging of vast video archives.
Amazon, Radical Ventures, Korea Investment Partners, Index Ventures, Quadrille Capital, and Red Bull Ventures also feature in the funding round at the company, which is building an AI tool that treats video archives as “a living, searchable system, unlocking footage that was historically too hard to analyze, operationalize, or monetize.”
TwelveLabs’ Pegasus 1.5 model turns video into structured data, making raw footage parseable. “The more content it indexes and the more analysis it runs, the more capable it becomes,” the company said. “This is intelligence that compounds with every video processed, not a tool that resets with every query.”
The funding will be used to scale its operations in San Francisco and Seoul and support expansion with new offices in New York and London.
“Five years ago, we made a contrarian bet: the substrate of machine intelligence is recorded reality in motion, not language,” said Jae Lee, CEO and co-founder of TwelveLabs. “Language is downstream of understanding. Video is the data understanding has to answer to. We have spent half a decade building the perception, knowledge, and reasoning architecture to close that gap. Models commoditize. The intelligence layer that composes them does not. This funding lets us take TwelveLabs from foundation models to a full-stack video cognition system that meets every user, every agent, and every machine that needs to understand the world. The road to Video Superintelligence starts here.”
Tiffany Luck, Partner at NEA, said TwelveLabs is positioned “to turn millions of hours of footage into intelligence that compounds over time, and as video understanding moves from novel capability to essential infrastructure, we believe TwelveLabs is the company defining what comes next.”
“TwelveLabs was the first investment NAVER Ventures ever made, and co-leading their Series B is the strongest expression of conviction we can offer,” said YJ Park, general partner at NAVER Ventures. “When we first met Jae, he described TwelveLabs as the visual cortex for future AI agents. That framing has only sharpened over time. As agents and machines move into roles where they need to perceive and reason about the physical world, video is the modality that matters most, and TwelveLabs is the team building that capability with the depth the problem demands. We are proud to co-lead this round.”
“TwelveLabs has been pushing the boundaries of what AI can perceive and reason about since its earliest days, and we’ve had the privilege of partnering with them throughout that journey,” said Jason Bennett, VP and global head of startups and venture capital at AWS. “Their models have been delivering real value to customers on Amazon Bedrock for more than a year, and as they scale their video cognition system on AWS infrastructure—including our purpose-built Trainium chips—we’re excited to deepen our partnership with a team that is defining video intelligence at production scale.”
