SK Telecom invests $3 million in startup 'Twelve Labs'... Utilizing multimodal AI

Consolidating Both Organizations' Capabilities... Advancing AI Agents
Applying Multimodal AI Technology for Security and Public Safety

SK Telecom announced on the 13th that it will invest $3 million in the artificial intelligence (AI) video analysis startup 'Twelve Labs.' Twelve Labs is a startup developing multimodal AI models capable of understanding and searching videos, founded in 2021 in San Francisco, USA.

This company gained attention earlier this June by successfully raising approximately $50 million in investments from NVIDIA's subsidiary NVentures and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), among others. It was also selected for three consecutive years from 2022 to 2024 in the global top 100 AI startups 'AI100' announced by the global research firm CB Insights.

Twelve Labs identifies various people and objects in videos and even understands their actions through its excellent AI video understanding models. Based on this, it provides the video search solution 'Marengo' and the video Q&A solution 'Pegasus.'

SKT and Twelve Labs expect that by combining their AI capabilities, they will be able to advance AI agent services and offer customers more innovative AI experiences.

For example, if requested to "Find videos of a baby taking their first steps" or "Classify and show videos where player Son Heung-min and player Kim Min-jae pass the ball," or "Summarize what happens in this video in text," the system finds the desired scenes and summarizes the video content in text.

Additionally, both companies have agreed to collaborate on developing related technologies for applying multimodal AI in security and public safety fields. In the case of AI surveillance systems, unlike before when a single operator had to monitor numerous CCTVs for long hours, applying Twelve Labs' multimodal AI model enables quick searching and summarizing of key incidents, movements, and individuals.

For integrated CCTV control centers, there is a growing demand for high-level real-time detection and search capabilities in adverse weather, relatively poor road conditions, and dark alleyways, so the opportunities for utilizing multimodal AI are expected to be limitless.

Furthermore, Twelve Labs will join the 'K-AI Alliance' led by SKT and work on various synergy projects with member companies, contributing to the activation of the AI ecosystem.

Lee Jae-sung, CEO of Twelve Labs, said, "We expect to provide innovative video understanding AI solutions to more industrial sites through cooperation with SK Telecom." Lee Jae-shin, Head of SKT AI Growth Strategy Division, stated, "Through collaboration between the two companies, we can further strengthen our competitiveness in the multimodal AI field," adding, "We plan to expand services and business areas where customers can genuinely experience AI innovation."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.