At the Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit, TwelveLabs cofounder Soyoung Lee laid out a simple but revolutionary pitch: the biggest headache for sports teams isn’t strategy on the field, it’s finding the exact clip buried in hours or decades of footage. She showed how semantic search — not the old, slow manual tagging systems — can pull the right moment in seconds so coaches, broadcasters, and rights holders can actually use their archives. That demonstration made clear that this isn’t academic tinkering; it’s practical technology built to solve a very real business problem.
Anyone who follows sports knows that teams, leagues, and broadcasters sit on mountains of video that go largely unused because metadata is inconsistent and tagging is manual and expensive. TwelveLabs and other startups have made the same point repeatedly: traditional object-detection and manual logging can’t scale to modern video volumes, and organizations are losing value as a result. The problem is a classic failure of old processes meeting new data; the private sector is stepping in to fix it where legacy systems have failed.
TwelveLabs’ approach is to build multimodal, foundation models that map plain-English queries to moments in video — identifying actions, objects, sounds, and context so users can ask for “the last defensive stop in the fourth quarter” and get the clip instantly. Their platform also offers automated summarization and the ability to tailor models with a customer’s own data, turning unwieldy libraries into searchable, monetizable assets. This is the kind of hands-on innovation that actually reduces waste and creates new revenue channels for honest, hard-working organizations.
Investors and industry partners have noticed, with TwelveLabs raising significant capital and aligning with big names in infrastructure and media, while striking partnerships to bring the tech into enterprise workflows. The company has publicly discussed major funding rounds and strategic relationships with infrastructure and chip partners to scale performance and reliability for demanding customers. These are the kinds of market validations that matter — when customers and investors put money down, it’s because the product solves a painful problem at scale.
Conservatives should cheer when American entrepreneurs out-hustle bureaucracies and build tools that empower businesses to work smarter, not harder. That said, we can’t be naive: powerful video-understanding tools can be misused if left unchecked by sensible policies that put ownership and civil liberties first. Sports franchises and media companies must keep control of their footage and contractual terms, and lawmakers should resist knee-jerk nationalization or top-down mandates that would strangle innovation in the cradle.
The right answer is simple and patriotic: back domestic innovation, demand transparency from vendors, and encourage private-sector solutions that respect property rights and privacy while unlocking economic value. TwelveLabs’ work shows how free enterprise still solves messy practical problems — and hardworking Americans ought to push teams and leagues to adopt tools that preserve their rights and grow their businesses.
