Higgsfield’s $400M Series B: $5.4B Valuation and $700M Revenue

Visual content is no longer hard to make; it is hard to make at the quality, speed and volume businesses now need. The old model — assemble a crew, shoot, post-produce — cannot feed what social media consumes. The company that attacked that bottleneck has grown faster than almost anyone expected.

Higgsfield, an AI video and image creation platform, announced on August 17 a $400 million Series B at a $5.4 billion valuation. That is more than quadruple the $1.3 billion it carried at its Series A extension in January. Over the same seven months, annualized revenue went from $200 million to $700 million.

A founder who sold to Snap, and a Kazakh researcher

Higgsfield was founded in 2023. Co-founder and CEO Alex Mashrabov previously built AI Factory, a computer vision company Snap acquired for $166 million in 2019 — the technology behind Snapchat’s Cameos and face filters. He then led generative AI at Snap, shipping AR effects and the My AI chatbot to hundreds of millions of users. Co-founder and CTO Yerzat Dulat is a Kazakh AI researcher known for widely used open-source libraries on GitHub.

The company started from “Click-to-Video.” While rival tools demanded elaborate prompting, Higgsfield let users click a curated preset and get a cinematic shot. A $50 million Series A led by GFT Ventures last September made it Kazakhstan’s first unicorn; an $80 million extension in January brought the Series A to $130 million. With this round, total funding reaches $530 million.

Agents drove a 42x jump

The engine behind this stretch is Supercomputer, an agentic product launched in May that automates complex, multi-scene visual production. In the three months since, users of Higgsfield’s agentic products grew 42-fold, now driving more than 20 million content generations per month.

The platform has over 30 million users across 238 countries and territories, with the US its largest market, and powers visual production for 390 of the Fortune 500 — spanning advertising, media and entertainment, broadcasting, fashion, retail, consumer brands, technology, financial services and pharmaceuticals.

“Every business needs visual content, but creating it at the quality, speed and scale companies demand remains complex and expensive,” said Mashrabov. “AI is fundamentally changing that. The next wave of value will be created by the applications that put this technology to work, and Higgsfield is leading that shift in visual media.”

Strategic money, and a supermodel

DST Global led the round. New investors include Tribe Capital, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Smash Capital, Fifth Wall, Valor Capital, Intel Capital, Liberty Global Tech Ventures, Mirae Asset Capital and NTT DOCOMO Ventures, alongside existing backers Accel, Menlo Ventures, AI Capital Partners, GFT Ventures, Capra Ventures, BAM Corner Point and BroadLight Capital.

The composition is telling: strategic investors from compute, connectivity, distribution, media and advertising came in together, which reads as those industries treating the platform as infrastructure rather than a vendor. Supermodel and impact investor Natalia Vodianova Arnault also joined as an investor and advisor, bringing 25 years across fashion, beauty and creative industries.

“We are looking forward to supporting Alex, Yerzat, and the team as they build the next generation of AI tools for visual creation,” said Yuri Milner, founder of DST Global. Kevin Mayer, the former Walt Disney executive who co-founded Smash Capital, added that “every major technology revolution in media gives birth to a new creative medium and spurs growth,” crediting Higgsfield with “empowering storytellers to push past the limits of traditional production.”

The capital goes to R&D, global infrastructure, AI hiring and go-to-market expansion.

Free training, scaled up

Higgsfield is also pushing at the skills gap. Higgsfield Academy, a free program teaching commercial-grade AI video production, has drawn more than 400,000 course visitors and 67,000 completed lessons. The company open-sourced its flagship AI-generated films, Hell Grind and The Cully Hill Boys, giving creators full access to the underlying project files.

Higgsfield For Good launches in September to help schools and nonprofits build and instantly localize visual learning materials across languages. Partnering with YGA, an NGO that has reached 1.9 million students over 25 years, it will supply tools to 70,000 students and 13,000 educators. Dulat is personally leading a STEM program across eight rural schools in Central Asia.

The competition: passed on revenue

Runway has long been the category leader. In February it raised a $315 million Series E led by General Atlantic at a $5.3 billion valuation, with Nvidia, Adobe, AMD and Fidelity participating — Mirae Asset was in that round too. Runway is pivoting beyond video generation toward world models, and most major studios use it.

Line the numbers up and the order has flipped. Higgsfield’s Series B valuation now exceeds Runway’s Series E ($5.4B vs $5.3B), and its $700 million ARR is more than double Runway’s. A company founded in 2023 has passed one building since 2018 — on revenue. They aim at different customers, though: Runway courts Hollywood and studios, while a large share of Higgsfield’s users are social media marketers. The company always argued the latter market was bigger. The numbers now argue for it.

Synthesia, focused on enterprise avatar video, reached a $4 billion valuation on $200 million last October, and HeyGen has crossed $100 million ARR. Above them all sit OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Veo and Kuaishou’s Kling.

Higgsfield’s answer is to avoid the head-on fight. Rather than competing with OpenAI or Google on model quality, it integrates their models and differentiates on enterprise security, collaboration and bulk throughput — positioning itself not as a company that builds models but as the company that puts models to work. Mashrabov’s line about value accruing to applications is that strategy in one sentence.