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Running the wire
Funding TwelveLabs raises $100M Series B to build video understanding for enterprise AI agents Funding LeapXpert raises $180M growth round led by Riverwood Capital for AI-governed enterprise messaging Funding Together AI closes $800M Series C at $8.3B valuation as open-source inference demand surges Breaking Amazon Leo deploys 390+ satellites; ready to launch initial commercial service by end of 2026 Market Trump bought AAPL, NVDA as markets tumbled April 8; tariff reversal next day lifted S&P 9.5% Funding Joulent lands $1.75B from National Grid; powers Microsoft data center with 2.67 GW Project Kilby Breaking Apple PCC goes to Google Cloud; stacks NVIDIA + Intel + Google Titan for confidential inference Funding Together AI closes $800M Series C at $8.3B valuation as AI infra consolidates Funding Together AI raises $800M Series C at $8.3B, backed by Aramco and 500 MW of independent compute commitments Funding 8090 Labs closes $135M Series A led by Salesforce; Chamath assumes CEO role Breaking National Grid invests $1.75B in Joulent; 2.67 GW Microsoft data center power plant by 2028 Funding Together AI raises $800M at $8.3B valuation, plans 50x capacity growth Chips SK hynix Plans $712.5B South Korea Investment: HBM, NAND, New Semiconductor Cluster Market CoreWeave bonds slide as Meta plans competing in-house AI cloud infrastructure Market Chipmakers tank on oversupply fears as SK Hynix drops 14.6%, Samsung 9.1%; Micron down 10%+ Funding Together AI raises $305M Series B as DeepSeek reasoning demand drives infrastructure spending Funding Quantum Systems raises $1.2B at $8B valuation as European drone defense spending accelerates Breaking Supermicro denies Taiwan office raid in GPU smuggling probe; employees under investigation for export violations Chips Turkey launches $5B chip incentive plan; Elin Energy breaks ground on $400M semiconductor fab in Sivas Market Tesla deliveries surge 25% YoY to 480K in Q2, beating Wall Street consensus by 18% Funding TwelveLabs raises $100M Series B to build video understanding for enterprise AI agents Funding LeapXpert raises $180M growth round led by Riverwood Capital for AI-governed enterprise messaging Funding Together AI closes $800M Series C at $8.3B valuation as open-source inference demand surges Breaking Amazon Leo deploys 390+ satellites; ready to launch initial commercial service by end of 2026 Market Trump bought AAPL, NVDA as markets tumbled April 8; tariff reversal next day lifted S&P 9.5% Funding Joulent lands $1.75B from National Grid; powers Microsoft data center with 2.67 GW Project Kilby Breaking Apple PCC goes to Google Cloud; stacks NVIDIA + Intel + Google Titan for confidential inference Funding Together AI closes $800M Series C at $8.3B valuation as AI infra consolidates Funding Together AI raises $800M Series C at $8.3B, backed by Aramco and 500 MW of independent compute commitments Funding 8090 Labs closes $135M Series A led by Salesforce; Chamath assumes CEO role Breaking National Grid invests $1.75B in Joulent; 2.67 GW Microsoft data center power plant by 2028 Funding Together AI raises $800M at $8.3B valuation, plans 50x capacity growth Chips SK hynix Plans $712.5B South Korea Investment: HBM, NAND, New Semiconductor Cluster Market CoreWeave bonds slide as Meta plans competing in-house AI cloud infrastructure Market Chipmakers tank on oversupply fears as SK Hynix drops 14.6%, Samsung 9.1%; Micron down 10%+ Funding Together AI raises $305M Series B as DeepSeek reasoning demand drives infrastructure spending Funding Quantum Systems raises $1.2B at $8B valuation as European drone defense spending accelerates Breaking Supermicro denies Taiwan office raid in GPU smuggling probe; employees under investigation for export violations Chips Turkey launches $5B chip incentive plan; Elin Energy breaks ground on $400M semiconductor fab in Sivas Market Tesla deliveries surge 25% YoY to 480K in Q2, beating Wall Street consensus by 18%
Funding

TwelveLabs raises $100M Series B to build video understanding for enterprise AI agents

TwelveLabs closed a $100 million Series B round co-led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and NAVER Ventures, bringing cumulative funding to over $200 million. Investors include Amazon, Radical Ventures, Korea Investment Partners, Index Ventures, Quadrille Capital, and Red Bull Ventures. Amazon Web Services is making AWS TwelveLabs' preferred cloud partner with a multiyear commitment: new models will launch on AWS first and be optimized for AWS Trainium AI chips, expanding Amazon's non-NVIDIA video AI capabilities.

TwelveLabs builds Marengo 3.0, a video embedding model that converts raw footage (speech, sound, motion) into searchable semantic representations at scale, and Pegasus 1.5, a domain-specific language for video that enables reasoning over up to two hours of continuous context. Unlike generative video tools (Sora, Veo, Runway), TwelveLabs indexes and queries existing video—addressing an enterprise pain point: billions of hours of video archives (surveillance, broadcasts, sports, factory footage, medical records) remain opaque to AI systems because current LLMs only sample isolated frames. The company reported it has 178 employees, up from 58 a year ago, and operates from San Francisco and Seoul.

The $100M raise signals investor conviction in video-understanding as a category distinct from video generation. Venture funding for vertical AI has become increasingly selective, with average deal size doubling year-over-year even as deal count falls. TwelveLabs' ability to attract Amazon's strategic investment (beyond equity) suggests enterprise demand for queryable video archives is real and growing across media, compliance, security, and sports workflows.

For infrastructure and ML teams, the strategic value here is not size but structure: Amazon's Trainium commitment locks TwelveLabs' models into AWS first and creates native support for video reasoning workloads. As agents and autonomous systems move into roles requiring perception and reasoning about physical reality, video becomes the modality that matters most, making teams that can extract semantic meaning from recorded footage increasingly critical to production AI stacks.

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