AI for video: Twelve Labs raises $100 million from Amazon

Twelve Labs, a startup building AI for video search, has received $100 million in investment from Amazon, the venture fund NEA and Korea's Naver Ventures. The money will go toward developing technology that can quickly search and analyze large volumes of video content.

Who joined the round and why

The investor lineup points to strategic, not just financial, interest in video search technology.

• $100 million: the size of the round, announced on July 1, 2026
• Amazon.com Inc.: the world's largest cloud provider (AWS)
• NEA Management Co.: one of Silicon Valley's leading venture funds
• Naver Ventures: the investment arm of South Korea's leading search engine

Amazon's participation matters most for Twelve Labs. AWS serves thousands of enterprise customers worldwide, and the investment creates a direct path to integrating video search into Amazon's cloud ecosystem. AWS enterprise customers will be able to add AI video search to the tools they already use, without changing infrastructure.

NEA Management is one of the oldest and largest venture funds in Silicon Valley. Its participation shows that the industry sees video search as a priority area, not a niche development.

Naver is South Korea's leading search engine, with a strong in-house AI lab. For it, multimodal search is a direct strategic priority: the ability to search video by meaning, not just by text, is critical for competing with Google in the Asian market.

Why video search is so hard to solve

Without specialized AI, finding a specific moment in a video archive is practically impossible. Traditional search engines can only index text: subtitles, descriptions, tags. If there are no subtitles, or if you need to find a visual moment, such as a person in particular clothing, a logo in frame or a specific gesture, standard tools cannot cope without manual tagging of every segment.

Twelve Labs builds multimodal models that analyze video as a whole: the visuals, the audio track and speech at the same time. This allows semantic queries and returns precise timestamps without prior tagging.

Hundreds of millions of hours of video are created every day: corporate meeting and webinar recordings, surveillance footage, media archives, training courses, user-generated content. Video makes up a growing share of corporate data, and the vast majority of it remains practically unindexed. This is where AI search creates measurable value for business.

What this means

The $100 million round with Amazon, NEA and Naver establishes Twelve Labs as one of the key contenders for leadership in the fast-forming AI video search segment. Amazon's strategic involvement provides an infrastructure base for scaling: in a race where early market entry determines long-term position, the AWS partnership becomes a significant competitive advantage.

What is AI video search?

It is technology that can quickly search and analyze large volumes of video content. According to Twelve Labs' developers, traditional technologies still handle this task poorly.

What is AI for video search?

It is a neural network that analyzes and searches content across large volumes of video material, something traditional technologies handle poorly.

Why do you need a neural network for video?

To quickly find the content you need in video databases and to analyze video by meaning, which was previously technically impossible.