South Korea’s top mobile carrier SK Telecom Co. said on Friday it will invest $3 million in Twelve Labs Inc., a Korean AI-powered video analysis startup, to use the startup’s technology in its AI agent services.
Established in San Francisco in 2021, Twelve Labs develops AI-based multimodal video understanding and search technologies.
The startup is known for attracting $50 million in a Series A funding round led by global chip designer Nvidia Corp. in June.
Nvidia’s venture capital affiliate NVentures and New Enterprise Associates, a new investor in Twelve Labs, jointly led the Series A round. Existing global investors including Index Ventures, Radical Ventures and WndrCo, led by DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Seoul-based Korea Investment Partners also joined the round.
The existing investors participated in pre-Series A funding of about $10 million last October, in which Nvidia made its first investment in a Korean generative AI startup.
SK TELECOM’S AI AGENT
Through the investment, SKT expects to enhance its AI Agent, an AI butler service, by combining the two companies’ AI expertise.
The two companies also agreed to collaborate on developing and advancing technologies for implementing multimodal AI in security and public safety applications, such as AI surveillance systems.
Unlike traditional surveillance systems where a single operator had to monitor numerous CCTV feeds for long hours, Twelve Labs’ multimodal AI model allows for quick searching and summarizing of key incidents, movements and individuals.
The two companies also plan to collaborate on developing and advancing technologies to apply multimodal AI in areas like security and public safety, including AI monitoring systems.
SK Telecom said Twelve Labs will join the K-AI Alliance, a group of Korean companies promoting AI technology, to collaborate with other members in fostering Korea’s AI ecosystem.
“Through the partnership with SKT, we look forward to providing our video foundation models to various industry use cases and provide real value in daily workflows in the ecosystem,” said Jae Lee, CEO of Twelve Labs.
Lee Jae-shin, head of AI Growth Strategy at SK Telecom, said: “Through the cooperation of the two companies, we will further strengthen our competitiveness in the multimodal AI field.”
TWELVE LABS’ AI TECH
Multimodal AI is used for a machine learning model, in which various data types including image, text, speech and number are combined with intelligence processing algorithms for accurate and sophisticated outputs.
Based on the multimodal model, Twelve Labs analyzes images and sounds in a video and matches them to human language. The model also can create text based on the video content, edit a short-form video and categorize videos by a certain standard.
The technology boosts efficiency in creating YouTube Shorts, setting up advertisement strategies for videos and even finding missing persons by analyzing closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage, according to the startup.
Twelve Labs has integrated some of Nvidia’s framework and services within its platform, including the NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core Graphic Processing Unit and NVIDIA L40S GPU, to improve its video understanding technology.
In March, Twelve Labs released the multimodal model Marengo-2.6, which enables various video, text, image and audio search tasks and also launched a beta version of Pegasus-1, which is specifically designed to understand and articulate video content.
By Seung-Woo Lee
leeswoo@hankyung.com
In-Soo Nam edited this article.
