SK Telecom (NYSE: SKM) announced today that it will invest $3 Million in Twelve Labs, a video understanding company gaining major attention in the global AI industry.

The San Francisco-based startup, established in 2021, develops multimodal video foundation models that can understand video content like humans do. The company is backed by leading venture capitalists, technology companies, AI luminaries, and successful founders.

Twelve Labs provides industry-leading video AI solutions designed to unlock the full potential of vast enterprise video archives. Its proprietary multimodal foundation models, Marengo and Pegasus, bring human-like understanding to videos, enabling precise semantic search, summarization, analysis, Q&A, and more. 

Additionally, both companies agreed to join forces in developing and advancing technologies for implementing multimodal AI in security and public safety applications, such as AI surveillance systems.

Unlike traditional surveillance systems where a single operator had to monitor numerous CCTV feeds for long hours, Twelve Labs' multimodal AI model allows for quick searching and summarizing of key incidents, movements, and individuals from any given day.

Multimodal AI technology enables better understanding of users. As it is expected to enable seamless interaction when deployed in customer service, SK Telecom and Twelve Labs plan to explore various opportunities for collaboration.

“Through the partnership with SKT, we’re looking forward to providing our video foundation models to various industry use cases and provide real value in daily workflows in the ecosystem,” said Jae Lee, CEO of Twelve Labs.

"Through the cooperation of the two companies, we will further strengthen our competitiveness in the multimodal AI field," said Lee Jae Shin, Head of AI Growth Strategy at SK Telecom. "We plan to expand our business areas and the range of services we offer so that customers can truly experience AI innovation."