TwelveLabs Raises $100 Million to Build 'Video Superintelligence'

The video-AI startup drew backing from NEA, Naver and Amazon to push its Marengo and Pegasus models from search toward reasoning over the world's video archives.

Jul 5, 2026Source: TwelveLabs

TwelveLabs Raises $100 Million to Build 'Video Superintelligence'

TwelveLabs, a startup building AI that can search and understand video, raised $100 million in Series B funding on July 1, 2026. The round was co-led by NEA and NAVER Ventures, with Amazon, Radical Ventures, Korea Investment Partners, Index Ventures, Quadrille Capital and Red Bull Ventures also taking part.

From video search to video reasoning

The company is known for two models — Marengo and Pegasus — that let software search and describe what happens inside video. It is now expanding beyond understanding into what it calls a Video Cognition System: a full-stack, agentic architecture that combines perception, knowledge and reasoning, with the aim of turning recorded video into a usable substrate for AI.

Who is using it

TwelveLabs says it has built deep traction in media and entertainment and is moving into the public sector, working with governments to apply video intelligence to mission-critical workflows. The raise comes as enterprises shift from experimenting with video understanding to deploying it at production scale — the transition the company is built around. Bloomberg reported that the round values TwelveLabs at more than $1 billion, making it one of the few video-focused AI unicorns.

A tighter bet on AWS

Amazon's participation comes with a deeper cloud relationship. AWS is already TwelveLabs' preferred cloud provider, and the company has now signed a multiyear commitment to optimize its video inference workloads for AWS Trainium chips. New frontier models, it said, will launch on AWS first.

What the money buys

TwelveLabs said it will use the capital to advance Marengo and Pegasus, to scale the Video Cognition System into what it calls the world's most important video archives, and to grow the team needed to do it.

Why It Matters

Text and images have driven the generative-AI boom; video — the largest and least-searchable body of enterprise and government data — has lagged because it is costly to index and reason over. A $100 million round and a billion-dollar-plus valuation for a specialist like TwelveLabs signals that video understanding is becoming its own production-scale market. Amazon's role also ties a fast-growing model maker more tightly to AWS's custom Trainium silicon, part of the cloud giants' push to reduce dependence on Nvidia.

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