Higgsfield, the AI video and image generation startup founded by former Snap executive Alex Mashrabov, said Monday it has raised $400 million in Series B financing at a $5.4 billion valuation — a figure that more than quadruples the $1.3 billion the company was worth just eight months ago. Underwriting that jump is a revenue curve that has gone very nearly vertical, and a customer base that has quietly stopped being made mostly of hobbyists.
The San Francisco company said its annualized revenue reached roughly $700 million this month, up from about $20 million a year earlier — a 35-fold increase in twelve months. The more consequential number is the mix. Businesses now account for the majority of that revenue, Mashrabov told the Financial Times, compared with less than a quarter in January. In the span of seven months, Higgsfield has flipped from a consumer creativity app that enterprises occasionally used into an enterprise software company that happens to have 30 million consumers attached.
The round, and who wrote the checks
DST Global led the financing, with new money from 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. Existing backers Accel, Menlo Ventures, GFT Ventures, AI Capital Partners, Capra Ventures, BAM Corner Point and BroadLight Capital also participated. Supermodel and impact investor Natalia Vodianova Arnault joined as an investor and advisor.
The roster is itself a tell: Intel Capital brings compute, Liberty Global and NTT DOCOMO bring connectivity and distribution, and Smash Capital brings Hollywood by way of co-founder Kevin Mayer, the former Walt Disney executive who now co-runs Candle Media. This is a cap table assembled around a supply chain, not just a software product.
"Every business needs visual content, but creating it at the quality, speed and scale companies demand remains complex and expensive," Mashrabov, Higgsfield's co-founder and CEO, said in the funding announcement. "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."
Boris Revsin, managing partner at Tribe Capital, framed the bet in blunter terms. "At Tribe, we look for true outlier metrics, and Higgsfield's revenue velocity and customer retention speak for themselves," he said. "By solving critical workflow bottlenecks for both global brands and Hollywood storytellers, Higgsfield is establishing the financial benchmark for creative software."
Agents, compute, and 390 of the Fortune 500
Higgsfield now says it powers visual production for 390 of the Fortune 500, spanning advertising, media and entertainment, broadcasting, fashion, retail, technology, financial services and pharmaceuticals. Its platform reaches more than 30 million users across 238 countries and territories, with the United States its largest market.
Management credits the surge to agentic products — tools that automate multi-scene production rather than generating one clip at a time. Following the May 2026 rollout of a feature called Supercomputer, users of those agentic products grew 42-fold in three months, driving more than 20 million content generations per month. Its Cinema Studio and Marketing Studio target filmmakers and ad teams respectively, and the company premiered AI-generated films at Cannes and in New York this year.
That volume is expensive. A large share of the new capital is earmarked for compute. "Video is one of the most compute-intensive domains in AI," Mashrabov told TechCrunch, noting that a single minute of video is roughly equivalent to processing 60,000 words. He added that he expects "enterprise adoption of video AI to become much more deeply embedded in everyday marketing and creative workflows." The rest of the money goes to R&D, global infrastructure, AI talent and go-to-market.
Why It Matters
Higgsfield's raise lands in a market that has spent two years arguing about whether AI video is a business or a demo. The answer arriving in 2026 looks like this: the money is in workflows, not models.
Consider the comparables. Runway raised $315 million in February at a $5.3 billion valuation, led by General Atlantic, and has been steering toward world models on roughly $300 million in annualized revenue. Synthesia closed a $200 million Series E in January at $4 billion, led by GV, on about $140 million in ARR, roughly 70% of it enterprise. Higgsfield claims more than double Runway's revenue and roughly five times Synthesia's at a valuation only modestly higher than either — which is precisely the argument its investors are making, and precisely the claim that deserves scrutiny.
The underlying models, meanwhile, are commoditizing fast. Google's Veo, ByteDance's Seedance and Kuaishou's Kling all ship frontier-grade generation with native audio, and any of them can be rented by the API call. If raw quality converges, the defensible layer moves up the stack to the boring parts: brand consistency, asset libraries, approval chains, rights management, integration with the marketing stack. Higgsfield's mix flipping from consumer to enterprise in seven months is evidence that enterprises will pay for that layer — and that the consumer tier, for all its 30 million users, may function primarily as a distribution funnel.
One caveat is worth stating plainly. Annualized revenue is a run-rate, not a year of collected cash, and consumer-heavy AI products have carried brutal churn. A 35x jump is spectacular; it is also twelve months of history on which to price a $5.4 billion company.
What to Watch
The tell will be retention and contract structure, not headline ARR. If Higgsfield's Fortune 500 relationships convert into multi-year agreements with expansion revenue — the pattern Synthesia has shown with net revenue retention above 140% — the valuation looks defensible. If the $700 million proves to be a run-rate inflated by consumer subscriptions and one-off pilot budgets, the eight-month quadrupling will read as the peak of a specific moment in AI capital markets. Watch, too, how much of the $400 million disappears into compute contracts: in a domain where one minute of video costs what 60,000 words of text costs, gross margin decides whether this is a software business or a rendering farm.
“Every business needs visual content, but creating it at the quality, speed and scale companies demand remains complex and expensive.”— Alex Mashrabov, Co-founder and CEO, Higgsfield