This image provided by Twelve Labs shows the generative AI startup’s logo and promotional language about its AI technologies. (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
SEOUL, Oct. 27 (Korea Bizwire) — Twelve Labs, South Korea’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup, has attracted a combined US$10 million from U.S. chip design company Nvidia Corp., U.S. chipmaker Intel Corp. and two others, according to the company Friday.
Nvidia has made its first direct investment in a Korean AI startup, Twelve Labs said in a statement.
The two other investors are Samsung Next, the corporate venture capital unit of Korean chip giant Samsung Electronics Co., and local equity fund Korean Investment Partners, the statement said.
Twelve Labs has developed hyperscale AI models that understand various types of information in video, such as text, logos, conversation and objective behavior.
“What Twelve Labs has accomplished technically is impressive. Anyone who understands the complexities associated with summarizing video will appreciate this leap forward,” Mohamed Siddeek, head of NVentures at Nvidia, said in the statement.
Nvidia believes Twelve Labs is an exciting AI company and looks forward to working with the team on numerous projects in the future, he said.
Twelve Labs didn’t provide the breakdown of the investment by the four companies.
This file photo provided by Twelve Labos shows the company’s logo. (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
“Starting with this investment, we will secure a leading position as a key player in the generative AI market through close partnerships with global top-tier chipmakers,” Twelve Labs said.
The latest investment comes after the Korean AI startup attracted $17 million from global venture capital firms, including Index Ventures, in a seed round in December last year.
Twelve Labs, founded in 2021, aims to create an infrastructure for multimodal video understanding and help developers build programs that can see, listen and understand the world as humans do.
World-renowned AI scholar Fei-Fei Li, who teaches at Stanford University, and Aidan Gomez, chief executive and co-founder of the AI foundation model company Cohere, advise the Korean startup. Cohere competes with Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the developer of the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, the statement said.
Twelve Labs has dual headquarters in Seoul and San Francisco.
(Yonhap)
