South Korea’s Twelve Labs was included as the only Korean company in CB Insights’ first annual GenAI 50 ranking, a list of the world’s top 50 most innovative companies developing generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications and infrastructure across industries.

Twelve Labs, known for its development of an AI model that understands video content, announced on Friday that it was included in the list alongside notable AI companies such as OpenAI, Midjourney, Hugging Face and Cohere in CB Insights’ distinguished lineup.

The decision by CB Insights to spotlight the top 50 generative AI startups follows its annual ‘AI 100’ ranking, which was initiated due to the rapid expansion of the generative AI market after the emergence of models like ChatGPT.

In making their selections, CB Insights took into account various factors such as the originality of technology, business performance, the caliber of talent, R&D and investment track records, and market positioning.

Twelve Labs has independently developed a massive AI model geared toward video understanding. They offer functionalities such as video search, classification, and generation through an application programming interface (API), allowing other AI firms to leverage their technology.

Silicon Valley venture capital (VC) firm Index Ventures and others invested in the company.

Twelve Labs attracted about $17 million in seed investment last year. This was possible due to their cloud partnership with Oracle and the acquisition of a significant amount of NVIDIA’s AI training graphics processing unit (GPU).

The company has plans to unveil its specialized generative AI model for video comprehension and new API features at the ‘Oracle Cloud World’ event in Las Vegas, US, later this year.Write to Jong-Woo Kim at jongwoo@hankyung.com

By Jong-Woo Kim