“Squid Game” creator Hwang Dong-hyuk‘s Firstman Studio has made a $3 million investment in entertainment-focused AI tech company TwelveLabs.
Co-founded by Jae Lee and Soyoung Lee, the San Francisco-based TwelveLabs is partnering with studios, streamers, creators and broadcasters to offer a system that “indexes and enriches video metadata down to the scene level, enabling editors, directors, and producers to work with unprecedented speed and precision while maintaining creative control.”
“Storytelling is becoming more global, more visual, and faster-paced,” Hwang said in a statement Thursday. “The creators who can adapt will shape the future of entertainment. I believe technology like TwelveLabs will be essential for turning ideas into finished stories at the speed audiences now expect.”
Hwang added: “AI tools are opening up new ways to create the power of cinema that we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. For me and Firstman Studio, it’s about giving filmmakers more time to focus on the art, the emotion, and the magic only they can bring to life.”
TwelveLabs differentiates itself from companies using generative AI to “create entirely new content,” and emphasizes its product’s “focus on enhancing what already exists.”
Per TwelveLabs, “Film and television archives contain billions of dollars’ worth of untapped footage. In many studios, less than 5% of that material is ever reused, largely because finding and preparing it for production is slow, manual, and fragmented. TwelveLabs’ video foundation models can search across hours of footage by visual, audio, and contextual cues simultaneously — making it possible to locate a specific scene, verify rights, and deliver usable files in a fraction of the time.”
“Some of the most valuable footage in the world goes underused because it’s too time-consuming to search, retrieve, and prepare for production,” TwelveLabs co-founder and head of GTM Soyoung Lee said. “We make video instantly searchable and ready to use at scale, so media companies, enterprises, and creators across industries can unlock more value from every frame they own.”
See below for Variety‘s Q&A with TwelveLabs CEO and co-founder Jae Lee about the company’s mission and partnership with Hwang.
How did Director Hwang get involved in the company? What led to the investment?
Director Hwang has always been drawn to innovation, whether in the way he tells stories or in the tools that help him bring them to life. When we connected, he was curious about how video AI could actually understand the emotional and narrative flow of a scene, not just surface-level cues like objects or dialogue. That depth of understanding resonated with him as a filmmaker. As he explored what our technology could do, he saw clear value for creators like himself, who want to spend less time bogged down in technical friction and more time focusing on the heart of the story. That alignment of vision is what ultimately led him to invest through his production company, Firstman Studio.
What is the long-term mission for TwelveLabs?
At the core, our mission is to index every video in the world and make it as easy to understand as text. More than 90% of the world’s data today is video, yet most of it remains locked away– whether in Hollywood archives, sports vaults, or corporate libraries. We want to change that.
By giving machines the ability to understand not just what’s in a video but also the context — the tone, pacing, or emotion, we make it possible for humans to focus on what really matters: the creative decisions. Over time, we believe this shift will turn video from a passive archive into an active, living resource that fuels storytelling, discovery, and entirely new kinds of experiences.
How do you see this technology benefitting creators like Hwang?
For filmmakers like Director Hwang, time is the scarcest resource. Hours are often lost cataloguing dailies, restoring archival shots, or verifying rights before an idea can move forward. TwelveLabs’ technology uniquely reduces that friction, surfacing the right scene faster, flagging potential issues earlier, and clearing the path so creators can focus more of their energy on emotion, framing, and story arcs.
This is supercharging the creative process. It’s giving storytellers more time for the magic only they can bring– things like deciding what moves people, what lingers in memory, and what defines a story. For someone like Director Hwang and his production company, that means less overhead and more freedom to focus on what he does best.
What are you doing to quell any fears about creators working with AI-focused companies?
Most of the fear comes from generative AI tools that try to replace human creativity by making net-new content from scratch. That’s not what we do.
TwelveLabs is about working with the material creators already have. We build models that index, search, and understand footage so editors, directors, and producers can move faster and smarter. The decisions about what to use, how to frame it, what story to tell, that’s still all human.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source variety.com ’
