Nvidia Just backed Two More Key AI Startups

TwelveLabs and Cohere

Hello Everyone,

I’m on a semi-break and will be posing slightly less in frequency in some of the summer months. I’ve been tracking Nvidia’s investments in AI a lot more closely in recent years and breaking news, two more that are both two of my favorites.

Cohere is about to raise 400-$500 million with backing by Nvidia and Twelve Labs just finished their Series A, that is $50 million. Cohere is a bit what I call the “OpenAI of Canada” without the secretive and reckless culture. Cohere are based out of Toronto, Canada.

Nvidia is investing in AI more than BigTech

How BigTech Invested in AI Companies in 2023

Why Cohere and Twelve Labs Matter

Cohere are certainly behind OpenAI and Anthorpic but for Canada, they are incredible. Nvidia Corp. is co-leading a $50 million investment in Twelve Labs Inc., placing its latest bet on a pair of Korean-born engineers who want to help users quickly search and analyze troves of video.

Cohere is talking with investors about raising $500 million or more, while Twelve Labs announced nine hours ago that it has secured Series A funding, co-led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and NVIDIA's NVentures, with continued support from our previous partners, including Index Ventures, Radical Ventures, WndrCo, and Korea Investment Partners.

Twelve Labs is an AI platform that empowers developers to create video search and understanding capabilities. Their technology extracts visual, audio, textual and contextual data from videos to enable semantic search, analytics and insights.

Cohere is mostly an Enterprise B2B foundation large language model builder. Oddly Salesforce and Cisco are also backing Cohere. Cohere builds large language models that allow AI to learn from new data, and can be customized and put into applications for features such as interactive chat or to generate text.

Ethically and technologically these are two AI startups I’m fairly bullish on.