The AI video startup Higgs Field, which was founded by some ex Snapchat executives, has just reached a 13 billion valuation.
This is massive, not just for the company, but I think for the AI video space.
And it shows you just how fast things are heating up.
It also shows that venture capitalists are still willing to back a lot of these big AI video plays.
Even when it feels like OpenAI, Sora and Google Gemini are really dominating with things like Google VO3 and like a lot of these big runway and Pika and like a lot of these big labs have these really impressive video products and they have billions of dollars behind them.
And yet we're still, you know, willing to invest into new startups, which means they believe that.
Open AI and Google are not going to run away with the market.
There's going to be a lot of other players here.
So today I want to get into the deal and how it's sort of structured, how they were able to raise this money and what their company is able to do, what sets them apart.
Get into all of that and the state of AI video today.
Before we do that, I wanted to mention, if you want to try, a lot of the AI models I mentioned on the podcast, including everything from Google OpenAI, Meta 11, Labs for Audio, tons of cool audio and video generators.
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All right, let's talk about this deal that's going down with Higgs Field right now.
I think what's interesting is this has actually grown a lot bigger than their original fundraising announcement that they did.
So they actually did an extension of their $50 million Series A. They closed that back in September.
They've now done an extension and they sold an additional 80 million in equity, which means that their total Series A is 130 million.
This is kind of an interesting thing.
You know a lot of people could be like, oh wow, like they, they were able to get all this extra money.
But also because we're seeing like rounds happen so close back to back for a lot of the big AI labs, doing a round in September and then doing a round in June.
January or I guess, like afterwards.
It could have been a series B, but they decided to tag it on as a series A.
What's the difference?
This is probably the same valuation, which means that perhaps their valuation didn't grow.
Now was the, you know, was the demand to invest in this the No?
I mean they were still able to get 80 million, which are more than their 50 million Series A.
But I do think it is interesting that they kind of just tagged this on instead of calling it a Series B.
But regardless, this is still a massive amount of money 130 million total that they raised in their Series A.
Side note this, I guess, does like, bode well and it looks good for the company to be like, no like, even.
Maybe sometimes they in the extension, sometimes they still do increase the price of the.
You know the valuation of the company.
But they still call it a series A, because then it's like no, we raised one hundred thirty million dollars in our series A, So we go for a series B.
It's going to be like much bigger than that.
So anyways.
It's all optics at this point, once you get into these kind of numbers.
Regardless, Higgins Field now says that they have hit a valuation of $1.3 billion.
So it is officially in unicorn territory, less than a year after it launched its core product.
And they were in development for longer before that, but a year after its core product, and they have now become a unicorn.
What's interesting is Higgs field builds software that essentially lets you generate and edit short form videos using AI.
So they're not, you know, uh, they're not kind of focused on these huge long form things.
Like they're really focused on these short form clips.
Um.
They're designed for consumers creators, social media teams, but their tool essentially can turn any text prompts into um and any images and any basic inputs into a polished video.
So this is very similar to what we're seeing with Google VO three and with Sora.
Um.
What they do differently is that they're specifically optimized for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Short.
So they're, like, really focused on making these short-form videos, unlike earlier generations of AI video tools that kind of focused on novelty clips.
Higgs Field.
What they're trying to do is essentially position themselves as sort of this end-to-end workflow product for producing content at scale.
They were founded by Alex...
Masha Brav, who previously led generative AI efforts over at Snap.
So obviously, you know, this is a legend in the industry.
He's got some incredible experience.
He joined Snapchat after acquired his earlier startup, which is called AI Factory.
And they acquired that for $166 million back in 2020.
So At Snapchat, he oversaw the development of AI powered creative tools, and he later became the core Snapchats.
He was really critical to Snapchats like camera and AR strategy.
And that whole experience that he had obviously has been able to shape a lot of what Higgs fields focusing on today for creators and social media platforms.
What I do think is interesting is that Higgs field launched their product publicly only nine months ago.
So it's not like it's been around for a very long time, and its growth numbers are really, really impressive, even for AI companies.
Five months after they launched, they reported 11 million users and they said that they had become a preferred platform for content creators.
As of this month, they say that they have surpassed 15 million users and they've reached 200 million in annual revenue run rate.
So according to them, that number has doubled from 100 million pace in roughly two months.
So, If this is all accurate, that growth would essentially put Higgs field among some of the fastest growing consumer facing AI companies to date, right.
Like, I mean, this is incredible growth.
They have some press material and they claim that their trajectory is outpacing well-known software startups like Lovable Cursor OpenAI, Slack and Zoom.
I mean...
OK, sure.
But it's going to be pretty hard to outpace OpenAI in the long run on video.
But I do think it's impressive.
But it's always funny when people toot their own horn and compare themselves to the growth rate of OpenAI, which I don't know if they're going to ever catch up to that.
But in any case, while a lot of those companies are, you know, inherently selective, they also underline how aggressively Higgs field wants to be perceived as more than just a viral app to try to reinforce that message.
They also have recently shifted a lot of their public positioning, rather than leaning into like meme culture or like experimental video generation.
Higgs field is now emphasizing that its core users are professional social media marketers and brand teams.
Right,
Because I think that was kind of the...
Where you could see the trap for a lot of these video generators fall into is kind of what Sora did where you go on Sora and you make these little funny clones of yourself and there's like Jake Paul on there that gave his permission for you to like make a video of him getting punched in the face by a punching glove and like...
There's all these silly things that are very novel that you feel like you could do with Sora.
And while Sora can be used probably for professional things, that is the brand image that Sam Altman generated for his Sora video generation app.
It was kind of goofy and funny.
They're not trying to go goofy and funny.
They're trying to be like, look, we are professional.
We're for serious brands.
We're for teams.
The company describes this as evidence that you know the adoption has moved beyond casual experimentation and into real business use, where teams rely on the platform to produce consistent on brand content at volume.
I mean, I think they really do have to make this pitch and say look, we're more than just kind of like a fun platform or a serious platform for business, because they know that the business is where the real money comes from.
And if they can't be taken seriously for that, then even regular users probably wouldn't use them as much for for funny stuff, because the novelty will wear off.
So, with all that being said, Higgs field has not fully escaped the downside of the kind of open ended generative tools.
Last month, the platform was used to create a controversial video titled Island Holiday, which depicted people named in the Epstein files alongside fictional characters portrayed as vacationing on Epstein's private island.
So the video went super viral on X.
It grew a lot of criticism because it was framed very offensively.
Higgs field didn't promote the content, but the episode highlighted the really the ongoing challenge that a lot of these AI media companies face in moderating how their tools are used.
I will say like at the same time, if you go to their website, there's a lot of very normal things that people are using this video generator for, not just Epstein Island viral videos.
You could see a lot of stuff in fashion, advertising, cinematic storytelling.
If you go over to there, there's a bunch of public examples and the output is often a lot closer to kind of these polished brand campaigns or short film trailers.
You can see all of those on their website.
So it's less of these kind of low effort viral content.
And I think more of these high quality things.
But that's kind of what they're highlighting on their website, right?
Because that's where they're trying to show off what you can do, what they want to be known for.
And I don't think that necessarily is indicative of what the actual use case of consumers is.
But I think this is the direction they would like to push people in and what they would like to highlight and be known for.
So this is kind of their pitch to be this professional creative tool rather than this kind of novelty image or video generator.
The Series A extension that they just did was backed by a bunch of familiar groups of growth stage investors.
They had Acel, Menlo's Ventures, AI Capital Partners, GFT Ventures.
The size of the round and the valuation, I think, suggests that there is a lot of investor confidence that AI video creation is going to become a core layer of the modern marketing stack.
It's not just a passing trend.
I think like, if you look at it from an even broader perspective though, like Higgs, field's rise really shows this big shift in generative AI away from just text and images and towards video, right.
This is definitely harder to build.
It's not as easy as images and text, but it's way more valuable for advertisers and platforms.
Videos get a lot more attention.
They drive a lot more engagement.
They're increasingly dominating how brands are communicating online.
So if higgs field can actually can actually like contribute to converting viral adoption into this kind of like durable business usage, i think it is going to end up less like an ai video, kind of like factory, and more like you know, infrastructure for how the internet's videos are actually getting made and this kind of like really useful tool.
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