Overview
- Twelve Labs closed a $100 million Series B led by NEA and NAVER Ventures with Amazon participating, a development reported on Thursday that formalizes AWS as the company’s preferred cloud provider.
- The company will optimize and launch new models first on AWS Trainium chips under a multiyear hosting agreement that moves compute and deployment toward Amazon’s infrastructure.
- Twelve Labs is shifting from selling standalone models to a platform approach built around Marengo, which converts raw footage into searchable data, and Pegasus, which reasons across hours of video to track entities and causation.
- The startup already integrates its models with Amazon Bedrock and trains large video models on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and it plans to use the new capital for research, product development, hiring, and new offices in New York and London.
- Investors including NVIDIA, Databricks-linked backers, and returning VC firms see enterprise demand for video search rising, a trend that could push more cloud providers to use investments to lock in startup compute and product roadmaps.