Valued at 36.6 billion yuan, the AI video unicorn has secured a new round of financing, with Intel participating in the investment.

Higgsfield's annualized revenue hits 4.7 billion yuan, the majority of which is contributed by enterprise clients.

August 17 report from Zhidx: According to today's report by the UK's Financial Times, US AI video generation unicorn Higgsfield has completed a $400 million (approximately RMB 2.71 billion) financing round, with a post-money valuation reaching $5.4 billion (approximately RMB 36.56 billion). Investors in this round include DST Global, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global and Intel.

As disclosed by the Financial Times, in August this year, Higgsfield's annualized revenue reached $700 million (approximately RMB 4.74 billion), compared with around $20 million (approximately RMB 135 million) a year ago, representing a roughly 34-fold year-on-year increase.

Roughly 8 months after completing the follow-up Series A financing in January this year, Higgsfield secured new financing again. In January this year, the company completed an $80 million (approximately RMB 540 million) follow-up Series A financing, bringing the total Series A financing to over $130 million (approximately RMB 880 million) with a valuation of $1.3 billion (approximately RMB 8.8 billion). Calculated on this basis, Higgsfield's valuation has increased by around 315% within 8 months.

Alex Mashrabov, co-founder and CEO of the company, said in an interview with the Financial Times that this round of financing will be invested in enterprise-level products, security systems and computing power. Alex Mashrabov noted that the supply of computing power remains tight at present, and Higgsfield will use the new funds to pre-reserve more computing power in advance.

Higgsfield Co-founder and CEO Alex Mashrabov

Founded in 2023, Higgsfield is an AI image and video generation platform targeting individual creators and enterprise marketing teams. Users can generate advertisements, short videos and film and television content via text, images or reference videos, and control characters, camera movements, picture styles and video key frames.

Its products include Cinema Studio for professional video production, Keyframes for generating storyboards, Soul ID that supports maintaining character identity consistency, as well as the image generation model Soul 2.0 and video generation tool Higgsfield DOP. Higgsfield also integrates third-party models from companies including ByteDance, OpenAI, Google, etc., allowing users to complete material generation and post-adjustment on the same platform.

In terms of feature-length film production, Higgsfield recently disclosed that it used the ByteDance Seedance 2.0 model integrated on its platform to produce the first AI feature film *The Cully Hill Boys* starring real actors. The film is 110 minutes long, with a production cost of around $2 million (approximately RMB 13.54 million).

Higgsfield released the feature film with footage generated by Seedance 2.0 on X (Source: X)

Film footage produced by Higgsfield (Source: X)

At present, Higgsfield has more than 30 million users covering 238 countries and regions, with the US being its largest market. Alex Mashrabov said that most of the company's current revenue comes from enterprise customers; back in January this year, the revenue contribution from enterprise customers was still less than 25%.

01. Three founders hail from the fields of AI products, model technology and advertising commercialization respectively

In 2023, Alex Mashrabov co-founded Higgsfield with Yerzat Dulat, and Mahi de Silva later joined the founding team.

Among them, Alex Mashrabov is the co-founder and CEO of the company, who is a serial entrepreneur. In 2018, he co-founded US on-device AI company AI Factory and served as Chief Operating Officer. The company participated in the development of Snapchat's video face-swapping product Cameos, and was later acquired by US tech social company Snap.

Documents submitted by Snap to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission show that the fair value of AI Factory at the time of acquisition was $128.1 million (approximately RMB 867 million).

After the acquisition was completed, Alex Mashrabov joined Snap and served as Head of Generative AI from 2020 to 2023. His profile shows that he participated in products including Snapchat chatbot My AI, generative AI effects and Cameos Stories. In October 2023, he left Snap and founded Higgsfield.

Alex Mashrabov's resume (Source: LinkedIn)

Yerzat Dulat, Co-founder and CTO of Higgsfield, is from Kazakhstan, and is mainly responsible for Higgsfield's model architecture, training infrastructure and multi-model scheduling system. Alex Mashrabov previously stated that Dulat participated in the development of features such as Camera Controls and Draw-to-Video.

The other co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Mahi de Silva also has multiple entrepreneurial experiences. He worked in engineering R&D at Apple from 1989 to 1996, participating in the Pink operating system project, and later served as Vice President of Engineering at VeriSign and other positions. After that, he co-founded mobile advertising company AdMarvel and conversational AI company Amplify.ai, and once served as CEO of short video platform Triller. At present, he is mainly responsible for Higgsfield's corporate strategy and commercialization.

02. Enterprise revenue share rose from less than 25% to the majority, with marketing videos generated in batches daily

Alex Mashrabov said that the face filters he participated in developing during his tenure at Snap were mainly for user entertainment, while Higgsfield is applying AI visual technology to enterprise marketing content production.

Since May this year, enterprises including US men's care brand Dollar Shave Club have started to use Higgsfield to build AI marketing systems. Instead of making only one video for a single marketing campaign, these enterprises generate multiple short marketing videos in batches every day based on different products and target audiences.

Alex Mashrabov revealed to the Financial Times that Higgsfield will use this round of financing to accelerate the expansion of the large enterprise market. At present, most of the company's revenue already comes from enterprise customers, while this proportion was less than 25% in January this year.

He noted that brand social media teams need to continuously update content, and AI videos can shorten the production cycle and reduce enterprises' dependence on high-cost creative agencies. However, Higgsfield has not disclosed the number of enterprise customers, subscription prices, renewal rates and the latest share of enterprise revenue.

In addition to marketing content, Higgsfield's tools are also used to make AI films, which has raised concerns among some film and television practitioners that creative positions will be impacted. However, the business priority disclosed by Higgsfield this time is still to expand enterprise marketing products, strengthen security capabilities and reserve computing power.

03. Conclusion: Video generation is integrated into enterprise workflows, the profitability challenge of AI video platforms remains to be solved

The change in Higgsfield's revenue structure shows that AI video platforms are evolving from creative tools for individual users to further integrate into the production process of enterprise marketing content. Compared with generating a single video occasionally, enterprises producing advertising content in batches every day can bring higher-frequency model invocation demands.

However, video generation also requires continuous investment in computing power. Higgsfield has not disclosed its gross margin, actual profit and computing power cost, so whether its rapidly growing annualized revenue can be converted into stable profitability still needs to be verified by subsequent data.

As enterprises begin to adopt AI marketing content in batches, the competition among AI video platforms will not only depend on generation effects, but also involve production costs, brand consistency, content security and computing power supply capabilities.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Zhidx" (ID: zhidxc om), Author: Qiezi, Editor: Cheng Qian, Published with authorization from 36Kr.