Higgsfield AI: The “Click-to-Video” startup rewriting how the internet makes videos

(5 minutes)

Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup. 

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead.

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email:

• ⚡This AI tool helps you create professional cinematic videos with a single click

• 💸 In just 5 months, they hit 11M+ users, driving 1.2B+ social impressions and a $50M revenue run rate.

• 💰They just raised a $50M Series A led by GFT Ventures with participation from BroadLight, NextEquity, AI Capital Partners, Menlo, and Alpha Square Group.

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Higgsfield AI 📈

Higgsfield AI was founded in October 2023 by Alex Mashrabov, Yerzat Dulat , and Mahi de Silva, with the mission to make professional video creation instant and scalable. ⚡

Higgsfield is an AI-native video reasoning engine built to be the backbone of synthetic media - turning ideas into cinematic video for the attention economy. 

Instead of prompt gymnastics, Higgsfield invented “Click-to-Video” - a new category where you pick a preset and one click outputs a cinematic clip. 🎬

No walls of text, no hours of tuning. Pair that with Draw-to-Video (sketch → animated scene) and Higgsfield Apps, and you get end-to-end workflows. 

From ideation → editing → post—right in the browser. 🤖

Under the hood, Higgsfield blends proprietary models with the best third-party ones (think Google VEO 3, Kling Speak, Nano Banana etc.), wired into enterprise-grade pipelines. 🍌

For longer videos and temporal consistency, Higgsfield leans on video understanding + reasoning (with Gemini playing a key role). 

The result? Predictable quality at the lowest inference cost - like having a VFX house on a hotkey.

Backstory 👀

Alex Mashrabov (CEO) has been early to every wave of generative media. 📸

He played ICPC-style sports programmer growing up (Top-10 Russia, Top-30 worldwide), and was obsessed with writing highly optimal code. 🎮

After graduating University, Alex built pre-Transformer translation systems at Yandex before the world believed in neural nets. 🧠

By 2017, he developed a firm belief that the future of media would be entirely AI-generated pixels. 

He recognized that while computational capabilities (GPUs, FLOPS) were thousands of times less powerful than today, simpler use cases like face animation were feasible.

This is when Alex met Victor Shaburov who together, co-founded AI Factory in 2018 which built human-generation tech (“Hollywoods in a pocket”) powering AR effects. The following year, in December 2019, they were acquired by Snapchat for $166M! 💸

Alex’s career was skyrocketing and he was finally liquid with millions. For the next 4 years, he worked at Snap as Head of Generative AI.

There, he got to launch some of the most-used consumer AI products globally, managing hundreds and learning how to ship to hundreds of millions safely. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

By Oct 2023, Alex left Snap. Why? AI made creation at Snap easier, but marketers still couldn’t scale.