Higgsfield, an 18-month-old AI video startup founded by former Snap executive Alex Mashrabov, 31, said this week it’s pacing toward a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate, calculated by taking the most recent four weeks of sales and multiplying by 13. That’s a 20x jump since September 2025, when the company sat near $200 million; it crossed $500 million in June and $700 million in August.

The composition of that revenue is the real story. Subscriptions once accounted for more than 90% of the top line and are now just over 60%. Roughly 70% of revenue comes from creative agencies and business clients, and contracted enterprise revenue has jumped tenfold since June. Enterprise adoption is growing 115% month over month, run by a team of fewer than 20 people. Net revenue retention sits at 300%.

Mashrabov attributes most of the acceleration to direct-to-consumer brands. He describes a “snowball effect”: once a DTC business sees positive ROI on an AI-generated ad, it generates more, then more again. Higgsfield claims the platform cuts production costs by up to 97%, and its Cinema Studio and Marketing Studio products pool roughly 35 models across image, video, audio and text, including Google’s Veo 3.1, ByteDance’s Seedance, Kuaishou’s Kling, Alibaba’s Wan, Black Forest Labs’ Flux, Higgsfield’s in-house Soul image model, and API access to ChatGPT and Claude.

The financing tracks the revenue curve. DST Global led a $400 million Series B at a $5.4 billion valuation, more than four times the $1.3 billion mark set by an $80 million Series A extension only seven months earlier, with Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Intel Capital participating. The browser product launched in March 2025 and now claims more than 30 million users across 238 countries, nearly 1 million paying subscribers averaging roughly $1,000 a year, and 390 of the Fortune 500 as clients.

The staffing math is the part rival founders will linger on. Around 150 employees, about half engineers, producing close to $5 million in annual revenue per engineer, against the $2 million benchmark SaaStr cites for software companies at scale. Runway, Pika and Luma are competing on model quality. Higgsfield is competing on the fact that a small consumer brand’s content cost floor just collapsed, and its competitors have already noticed.

Sources