Twelve Labs

How 3 Founders Built a $27M Video AI Business from Scratch

February 28th, 2025

Founded By
Jae Lee
Founders
3
Profitable
Yes
Year Started
2021
Customer
B2B

Who is Jae Lee?

Jae Lee, the co-founder and CEO of Twelve Labs, was born in Seoul and later moved to the United States, where he attended the University of California, Berkeley, studying computer science before founding the company during his military service.

What problem does Twelve Labs solve?

Twelve Labs helps customers by making it easy to find specific video scenes and understand video content, solving the frustration of sifting through hours of unwieldy footage.

Twelvelabs

Twelvelabs

How did Jae come up with the idea for Twelve Labs?

Jae Lee came up with the idea for Twelve Labs while serving in the Korean Cyber Command, where he collaborated with others passionate about AI. Immersed in a setting ripe with innovation, Lee noticed a glaring gap in the world of AI: there was significant focus on text and image processing, but video understanding—a growing data type—was understudied. This insight prompted him to explore multimodal video understanding as a key area to advance AI capabilities.

Through discussions and research with peers, Lee realized that the market needed a better infrastructure to handle the complexity of video data. The burgeoning volume of video, coupled with the inadequacies of existing video AI models, highlighted an opportunity to create powerful tools for video comprehension. Early on, Lee and his co-founders were not deterred by their limited resources; instead, they used their strong conviction and the support of like-minded individuals to lay the...

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