Hello everyone, happy long weekend, and welcome back to Inc.’s 1 Smart Business Story! Higgsfield has a remarkable growth journey for an AI video startup that’s only two years old: the company hit a $5.4 billion valuation in August after raising a $400 million Series B.

The startup, founded by Alex Mashrabov, former head of AI at Snap, reaches out to creators and small- to midsize businesses as customers—users who are already comfortable with AI. According to estimates from a market intelligence firm, Higgsfield, AI was visited more than 361 million times from January to July this year—that’s 10x the number of visits from the same period last year.

Inc.’s Silicon Valley correspondent Lisa Bonos talked to customers of the video platform about how they convinced their clients that AI video could look just as good, if not better, than traditional media.

In this story you’ll discover:

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The two-year-old startup rocketed to a $5.4 billion valuation thanks to its prescient bet on serving small and midsize businesses that need ‘infinite creative.’

BY LISA BONOS

Cheers rise from a soccer stadium as players approach the pitch, adjusting their uniforms and picking up the pace the nearer they get. A spectator takes out a massive vintage cellphone. The camera pulls back to reveal two young fans watching it unfold on television, wearing sweatshirts emblazoned with “Maradona,” for the late Argentine soccer player.

This ad for apparel honoring Diego Maradona was not made from footage of the 1986 World Cup match in which Argentina beat West Germany to win the championship. The creative agency One of One Studios secured permission to build an AI likeness of the soccer player and used a generative AI video platform to create an advertisement for an apparel line that reached more than 10 million people on social media. The collection sold out in three weeks, according to Higgsfield, the platform used to create the ad. 

AI video generation tools have come a long way since choppy images of Will Smith eating spaghetti went viral three years ago. As the various video models have improved, the race to develop the dominant AI video platform has become a contest of World Cup proportions. Startups like Runway (estimated to be worth $6.3 billion, according to PitchBook, with key partnerships in Hollywood) and Synthesia (valued at $4.7 billion, per PitchBook, whose tools major U.S. brands use to make training and marketing videos) have been building AI video creation and editing platforms to compete with Canva’s and Adobe’s creative tools.

Gaining speed in this race is Higgsfield, founded in 2024 by Alex Mashrabov, former head of AI at Snap. In just two years, Higgsfield reached a $5.4 billion valuation after raising $400 million in Series B funding in August. The startup is courting creators and small to midsize businesses as customers, a market that’s already comfortable with and prone to use AI. According to estimates from the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, Higgsfield AI was visited more than 361 million times from January to July this year, a greater than 10-fold increase over the same period in 2025. The company, which has about 300 employees worldwide, said it ended 2025 with a $200 million annualized run rate. 

As companies’ budgets for creative ad campaigns decline and the hunger for fresh content on social media grows, Higgsfield is carving out a niche as the generative AI video Swiss Army knife for churning out digital ads quickly and efficiently. And even as some consumers have criticized businesses for using AI, Higgsfield’s growing use shows that companies, large and small, are willing to experiment. 

Mashrabov is well-acquainted with the difficulties of harnessing social media’s fickle attention span. After Snap acquired his startup AI Factory in 2019, Mashrabov and his team created the face filters that became synonymous with the platform. Recognizing the obstacles smaller teams face in creating a steady flow of social media content with a lifespan of just a few days and requiring many permutations, Mashrabov identified small brands and startups as Higgsfield’s ideal market. 

“The challenge which we observe across many industries is that budgets have been defining creative formats and genres, and this was limiting creativity,” Mashrabov says. Now AI allows people to search for new visuals that were “either too expensive or impossible to make before,” he says, and as the AI models have improved, creative teams have been more willing to embrace these tools.

When Menlo Ventures led Higgsfield’s $8 million seed round in 2024, the venture capital firm had been looking to invest in a founder with both technical and commercial expertise in AI video. Amy Wu Martin found that combination in Mashrabov. “Alex just has such an amazing finger on the pulse of what the customer wants,” Wu Martin says, adding that his Snap experience gave him an understanding of both consumers and advertisers.

Mashrabov first aimed to create a superior video model, later pivoting Higgsfield toward variety, offering customers access to about 30 video and image AI models plus Higgsfield’s proprietary one to do everything from swapping out product-shot background colors to engineering slow-motion or camera pans to creating whole ads with AI. “We intend that people … without any knowledge of prompt engineering or models, creative professionals, can just go and make compelling content,” Mashrabov says.

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