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The AI video startup Higs Field, which was founded by some ex Snapchat executives, has just reached a $1.3 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 PKA 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 OpenAI 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. 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, go check out my startup, which is AI Box AI. There's a link in the description. You get access to over 40 different AI models all in one place. You can chat with them just like ChatGPT, switch between models, test them, compare them side by side. It's $20 a month and you don't have to have subscriptions to a dozen different services. And all of your data's in one place. So if you want to check it out, there's a link in the description to AI Box AI. All right, let's talk about this deal that's going down with Higfield right now. I think this. 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 January or I, I guess like afterwards. It could have been a Series B, but they decided to take 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 dampened? No, I mean, they were still able to get $80 million. Those 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, of the valuation of the company. But they still call it a Series A because then it' raised $130 million in our series A. So when 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, Higginsfield now says that they have hit evaluation 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 Higsfield builds software that essentially lets you generate and edit short form videos using AI. So they're not, you know, they're not kind of focused on these huge long form things. Like they're really focused on these short form clips. They're designed for consumers, creators, social media teams, but their tool essentially can turn any text prompts into any images and any basic inputs into a polished video. So this is very similar to what we're seeing with Google VO3 and with Sora. What they do differently is that they're specifically optimized for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube shorts. 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. Higs 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 Masher 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 was called AI Factory and they acquired that for $166 million back in 2020. So at Snapchat he oversaw of AI powered creative tools and he later became the core Snapchats. He was really critical to Snapchat's like camera and AR strategy and that whole experience that he had obviously has been able to shape a lot of what Higs Field's 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 their own, some, some press material and they claim that their trajectory is outpacing well known software startups like lovable cursor, OpenAI, Slack and Zoom. I mean, okay, sure, but it's, it's going to be pretty hard to outpace OpenAI in the long run on video. But I do think, I mean it's, it's impressive, but I don't know, 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 are, you know, inherently selective, they also underline how aggressively Higsfield 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, Higsfield 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, you know, there's like all these like 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 like that is the brand image that Sam Altman generated for his Sora video generation app. It was like 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. We're 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. Higsfield 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, 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 definite 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 a cell 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 Higsfield's rise really shows this big shift in generative AI away from just text and images and towards video. Right? This is it 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 Higsfield 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. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If this was an interesting deep dive on the state of AIM video and what Hicksfield is doing. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to leave a review on the podcast. It helps us show out a ton to get found by more incredible people like yourself. And as always make sure to go check out AI box AI if you want to try a lot of the different AI models I talk about on this show all for at one place for $20 a month. Thanks so much for tuning in. I'll link to AI boxes in the description and I'll catch you in the next episode.