TwelveLabs, a developer of multimodal AI for video understanding, announced today that it has received a strategic investment from Firstman Studio, the production company behind the global hit “Squid Game.” The deal marks a significant vote of confidence in AI technology from a major content creator, underscoring its growing importance in entertainment production.

TwelveLabs’ technology can analyze video, audio, and context simultaneously to pinpoint specific scenes in hundreds of hours of footage within seconds. The platform is already being used by major studios, streaming services, and broadcasters worldwide to unlock the potential of their massive video libraries.

“Storytelling is becoming more global and evolving faster than ever,” said Hwang Dong-hyuk, director of “Squid Game” and head of Firstman Studio. “The creators who embrace these changes will define entertainment’s future. TwelveLabs’ technology is critical for turning ideas into high-quality content at the pace audiences expect.”

Despite having billions of dollars worth of content in their archives, global studios only actively use about 5% of it. The culprit is a slow, inefficient search and preparation process. As production budgets climb and timelines shrink, TwelveLabs’ video understanding technology promises to fundamentally change how content gets made.

Rather than generating new footage like other AI tools, TwelveLabs focuses on maximizing the value of existing premium content. Its scene-level indexing and analysis give editors and directors speed without sacrificing creative control. Studios, streaming platforms, and broadcasters are using the technology to automatically identify brand-safe scenes for advertising, restore and repurpose archived footage, and search sports highlights, among other applications.

The investment symbolizes the convergence of Korea’s creative prowess and cutting-edge AI capabilities on the global stage. By combining the production know-how behind world-conquering K-content with leading video understanding technology, TwelveLabs is building a global platform serving creators from Seoul to Los Angeles to London.

“Having a major global production company invest in us validates that our technology solves real problems in entertainment,” said Jae Sung Lee, CEO of TwelveLabs. “We’re committed to advancing video AI so creators can tell even more innovative stories.”

Since launching in 2021, TwelveLabs has rapidly gained traction in the global AI market. The company has been named to CB Insights’ Global Top 100 AI Startups list for four straight years and, this past April, became the first Korean AI model selected as an Amazon Bedrock provider—recognition of its technological leadership.

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