A Shanghai chip startup, TwelveLabs, closed a $100 million Series B on July 1, 2026, co-led by NEA and Naver Ventures, with Amazon investing directly and naming AWS as the startup's preferred cloud partner. The round included Amazon, Radical Ventures, Korea Investment Partners, Index Ventures, Quadrille Capital and Red Bull Ventures. Bloomberg reported that Amazon's investment came with a deeper commercial arrangement: AWS would become TwelveLabs' preferred cloud partner, and the startup's next generation of models would launch first on AWS Trainium chips rather than Nvidia's hardware. TwelveLabs has grown to roughly 178 employees, up from about 58 a year earlier, and raised a $50 million Series A in 2024, co-led by NEA and Nvidia's venture arm, NVentures. The company is now describing a Video Cognition System, built around perception, memory and reasoning in one architecture. CEO Jae Lee said TwelveLabs started five years ago from the view that video, not text, is the closest digital record of reality as it unfolds.