TwelveLabs raised $100 million in a Series B round announced on July 1, 2026, co-led by NEA and NAVER Ventures. The round pushes the video-AI startup's total funding to roughly $150 million, but notably, no valuation was disclosed — a gap worth paying attention to given how loudly other 2026 AI rounds have advertised their numbers.
Here's what TwelveLabs does, who backed the round, and what the money is actually for.
What is TwelveLabs?
TwelveLabs builds AI models that let machines search, understand and reason over video — not generate it. Founded in 2021 by CEO Jae Lee, the company is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with a major engineering presence in Seoul.
Its core products are two model families:
- Marengo — a video embedding model that converts speech, sound, motion and visual events into a searchable semantic layer. The latest version, Marengo 3.0, is pitched as understanding "every sound, every word, every motion on screen across time."
- Pegasus — a model that structures that raw understanding into usable output: timelines, relationships and events extracted from long-form video.
The pitch is that video is the least-indexed major data type in the enterprise. Text and images have had a decade of AI search tooling built around them; video libraries — in media, sports, security, advertising and government — remain largely un-searchable without manual tagging. TwelveLabs is trying to be the layer that fixes that, similar in spirit to how other infrastructure plays are targeting under-served corners of the AI stack — see our coverage of AI video startup funding in 2026 for how crowded this category has gotten.
The raise: $100M Series B
The headline numbers:
- Amount: $100 million
- Round: Series B
- Valuation: Undisclosed
- Announced: July 1, 2026
- Lead investors: NEA and NAVER Ventures
- Total funding to date: ~$150 million
The lack of a disclosed valuation stands out. Plenty of AI infrastructure rounds this year have led with a headline valuation multiple as the story — TwelveLabs' announcement didn't. That could mean the number wasn't as flattering a step-up as peers', or simply that the company and its investors chose not to make it part of the narrative. Either way, treat any valuation figure you see cited elsewhere as unverified unless TwelveLabs or a lead investor confirms it directly.
Who invested in TwelveLabs?
The round was co-led by NEA (New Enterprise Associates) and NAVER Ventures, the investment arm of South Korean internet giant Naver — a pairing that reflects TwelveLabs' dual base in the US and South Korea. Participating investors included:
- Amazon
- Radical Ventures
- Korea Investment Partners
- Index Ventures
- Quadrille Capital
- Red Bull Ventures
Amazon's involvement is doing double duty here. Alongside its investment, AWS signed a multiyear commitment to be TwelveLabs' preferred cloud provider, with the company's video inference workloads optimized specifically for AWS Trainium chips. That's a strategic-investor pattern that's become routine in 2026: a hyperscaler writes a check and locks in the startup as a showcase customer for its own silicon, in one motion.
What TwelveLabs will do with the money
TwelveLabs said the funding will go toward:
- R&D expansion in its two hub cities, San Francisco and Seoul
- New offices in New York and London, to serve growing international customer demand
- Continued build-out of its model line under the banner of "video superintelligence" — the company's term for moving beyond video understanding (search and retrieval) toward a fuller agentic system that combines perception, knowledge and reasoning about video content
That framing matters: TwelveLabs is explicitly positioning its next phase as more than a search tool, aiming at systems that can reason about what's happening across a video, not just index it.
Why it matters
TwelveLabs' round is a useful data point for three reasons:
- Video is the next frontier for "understanding" AI. After years of the industry racing on text and image models, dedicated video-understanding infrastructure is attracting real capital — not just from generalist VCs but from strategic players like Amazon and Naver.
- Not every round needs a splashy valuation to matter. In a year where funding announcements often lead with eye-popping multiples, TwelveLabs raising $100 million without publishing a valuation is a reminder that the number isn't always the point — the customer and cloud commitments here (AWS, Trainium) may be the more important signal.
- Hyperscaler-as-investor is the default pattern now. Amazon investing directly while also becoming TwelveLabs' preferred cloud partner mirrors what's happening across the AI infrastructure stack — capital and compute lock-in are arriving together.
For more on how much money is moving through AI video specifically, and how TwelveLabs compares to other players chasing the same niche, see our AI video startup funding 2026 roundup.
Full announcement: TwelveLabs Raises $100 Million in Series B Funding to Build Video Superintelligence (GlobeNewswire, July 1, 2026).
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