Higgsfield, the AI video startup founded by former Snap executive Alex Mashrabov, has attracted investment from NVIDIA and growth-stage fund TCV as an extension to its Series B round, the company said on October 23. The funding will support global infrastructure and hiring as demand for AI-generated video keeps climbing.
The announcement was timed with NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang’s visit to Kazakhstan, where the majority of Higgsfield’s engineering team is based. The San Francisco-headquartered company said its registered users have grown past 40 million, with 10 million paying customers added since its summer fundraising.
The new money extends a Series B round raised in August that brought in $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation, led by DST Global. Higgsfield did not disclose the size of the extension or its latest valuation.
What The Investors Are Buying
Higgsfield bills itself as a specialist service for brands and creators looking to generate media and content at scale. Its platform aggregates about 35 AI video models from other providers alongside its own engine, letting users mix different models for storyboarding, character creation, audio and finished video.
The economics are the draw. Mashrabov said last month that Higgsfield is on track to surpass $1 billion in annualised revenue based on current performance — an extraordinary revenue line for a company founded in 2023 by Mashrabov and Kazakhstani AI engineer Yerzat Dulat. TCV, which has previously backed Netflix, Spotify and ByteDance, said it was investing because Higgsfield had shown “a radically faster, professional-grade and AI-native mechanism for creators, brand marketers and agencies alike to turn ideas into images and video”.
NVIDIA’s Growing Appetite For AI Video
NVIDIA’s participation is the strategic signal. The chipmaker has been moving up the stack from hardware into the application layer: it backed US rival Runway AI’s $315 million round in February at a $5.3 billion valuation, and this week signed a robotaxi MoU with Pony AI and inDrive during the same Kazakhstan trip. AI video generation is notoriously capital-intensive, and the startups that survive it are becoming natural outlets for NVIDIA’s compute.
The sector’s valuations keep climbing. China’s Kling AI, owned by Kuaishou, raised $2.8 billion at about a $15 billion valuation this summer, dwarfing Runway’s round. Higgsfield’s extension puts it firmly in that top tier — a company with tens of millions of users, a billion-dollar revenue trajectory, and now NVIDIA itself as a backer.
Why It Matters
Higgsfield is shaping up as the commercial proof that AI video has moved from research demos to a real business. Forty million registered users and a billion-dollar revenue run rate make it the kind of company that can pull NVIDIA into a strategic round — and NVIDIA’s interest signals where the chipmaker thinks the next wave of compute demand is coming from.
The Kazakhstan angle matters too. A San Francisco startup running most of its engineering out of Kazakhstan, announced during a Huang state-style visit, shows how the AI supply chain now stretches well beyond the usual hubs — and how closely NVIDIA tracks it.
The funding also continues a pattern visible across this week’s GTC Berlin announcements: NVIDIA is systematically embedding itself in the commercial application layer, not just the silicon. From robotaxis in Kazakhstan to AI video startups, the chipmaker is turning its biggest customers into partners — and its partners into distribution for its compute.
Background
The AI video race has been accelerating all year: Kling, Runway and Veo have been trading leads since Sora reset expectations, and production studios like Nova are committing real budgets to AI-generated series. Higgsfield’s multi-model approach — renting everyone else’s engines alongside its own — has let it scale faster than the labs building single models. The question now is whether the economics hold as video generation gets cheaper.
Source: The Edge Malaysia (Bloomberg)
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