SK Telecom (SKT) invested $3 million in Twelve Labs, a US-based AI video analysis start-up which raised $30 million from five strategic investors in its latest funding round.

The South Korean operator also agreed to jointly develop and advance the use of multimodal AI in security and public safety applications including surveillance systems.

Twelve Labs was established in 2021 and states its proprietary multimodal foundation models Marengo and Pegasus bring “human-like understanding” to videos, enabling precise semantic search, summarisation and analysis.

It added its multimodal AI model allows for quick searching and summarising of key incidents from numerous CCTV feeds.

Because the technology can enable seamless interaction when deployed in customer service, the pair plan to explore various opportunities for collaboration.

Databricks, HubSpot Ventures, In-Q-Tel and Snowflake Ventures also made strategic investments in the start-up, which hired partner at Saehan Ventures and former SKT CTO as president and CSO Yoon Kim.

Twelve Labs is backed by Index Ventures, Radical Ventures, WndrCo and Korea Investment Partners.

It closed a Series A funding round co-led by New Enterprise Associates and Nvidia’s NVentures in June.

SKT’s investment comes a week after it reorganised into seven business divisions to strengthen its competitiveness and drive its AI ambitions.