How Higgsfield scaled to a $400M run rate in 13 months
Higgsfield co-founder and CEO Aleksandr (Alex) MashrabovDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → shared the company's founding story in June 2026, charting its rise to a $400M annual run rate and more than 24 million users just 13 months after launch — which he describes as making it the fastest-growing video AI startup in the world.
Mashrabov had previously sold his earlier company AI Factory to Snapchat in 2019 for $166M, then spent four years there running generative AI. By 2022, watching TikTok and CapCut climb into the world's top five apps, he became convinced the next billion-dollar creator platform would be a production tool.
In 2023, Mashrabov and Yerzat Dulat founded Higgsfield and spent the first year on R&D. They built a mobile app in 2024, but soon realised professional creatives still rely on desktop for video creation. The team sat down with eight people from the creative industry — including Hollywood-level directors — who all said they wanted precise camera control over angles, movements and techniques. Higgsfield hired four of them, placed them alongside its ML engineers, and rebuilt the product around what professionals actually needed.
The web platform with professional camera controls launched in April 2025, followed by a library of visual effects in May 2025 — which hit $10M ARR in its first month. By summer 2025, the creative team had originated viral AI hooks that spread across Instagram and TikTok, from the satellite camera swoop to the eye zoom and outfit morph, with the likes of Will Smith, Madonna, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and leading European football clubs running content made on Higgsfield. In December 2025, Stripe flagged Higgsfield as a top-10 fastest-growing account on its platform as it crossed a $200M run rate and launched Team and Enterprise plans. By mid-2026, Mashrabov said 390 of the Fortune 500 brands were making their Super Bowl and Olympics ads on Higgsfield.
Read more: Alex Mashrabov on X
