Alex Mashrabov didn’t set out to build another AI company promising to revolutionize marketing.
At Snap, a company popularly known for its flagship Snapchat product, Mashrabov led the company’s generative AI efforts. He had a front-row seat to how quickly culture now moves online—and how often marketing shows up just after the moment has passed. A song goes viral, a format takes off, a meme mutates into something new, and by the time a campaign clears approvals, the internet has already moved on. For younger audiences that lag often meant irrelevance.
“For a marketing team, it’s very difficult to figure out every day what’s actually worth attention for younger demographics,” Mashrabov told ADWEEK.
That disconnect became the premise behind Higgsfield. Founded in October 2023, the company positions itself as an end‑to‑end AI platform for social video creation that is explicitly built for marketers.
Unlike companies racing to dispatch a single best video model almost every week, Higgsfield positions itself as an orchestration layer. The platform offers access to a growing roster of generative video tools—including models from Google, Freepik and others—allowing people to choose which system makes the most sense for a given prompt or creative goal.
Mashrabov borrows the company’s name from quantum physics, where the Higgs field is the invisible force that gives particles their mass. In marketing, he sees a similar problem where brands and creators may have ideas and stories, but video is the only way those ideas gain weight online. Higgsfield’s pitch is simple—turn fast‑moving trends into tangible, on‑brand video before the moment passes.
Once on Higgsfield, the workflow is deliberately simple. People can generate images, turn stills into video, animate presets, or build AI influencers. Brands can start with an image or prompt, chooses a preset designed for a specific social format, and renders a video already sized for platforms like TikTok or Instagram. Qatar Airways, for instance, used Higgsfield to produce a 2026 New Year post on Instagram, turning static brand assets into short-form video.
The platform’s early adoption skewed heavily toward creators. Musicians including Snoop Dog, Madonna and Will Smith used Higgsfield to augment existing content, experimenting with camera controls and visual effects, Mashrabov said. Over time, that experimentation evolved a creative guidance for marketers, moving from storyboards to finished video.
Today, about 85% of activity on Higgsfield is tied to brand campaigns, according to the company. Mashrabov said the platform has amassed more than 15 million creators in the past year and surpassed $250 million in annual recurring revenue, most of it driven by subscriptions. This comes as its most recent $80 million Series A extension, bringing the total funding to $130 million and values the startup at more than $1.3 billion, ADWEEK previously reported.
“We’re not designing a platform just for prompt engineers or technical users,” Mashrabov said. “We want it to be accessible to a regular social media marketer.”
Higgsfield does not train its own foundation models from scratch. Pre-training is handled by the underlying models it integrates with, the company said, while Higgsfield post-trains and fine-tunes its systems using proprietary data sources.
Notably, Mashrabov doesn’t see Higgsfield competing most directly with companies like OpenAI or Adobe. Instead, he points to ByteDance—the global tech giant behind TikTok—as the real benchmark. Beyond the social platform itself, ByteDance operates a growing stack of video and marketing tools, from CapCut to its marketing cloud platform BytePlus.
“When I looked at CapCut, it’s way more suited for marketers and creators, than any other incumbent software, including Adobe and other giants,” he said.
That philosophy extends to how Higgsfield differentiates itself from consumer‑facing AI tools such as Sora. Mashrabov draws a sharp line between platforms built for mass experimentation and those designed for professional production. Consumer products must drive generation costs toward zero to support scale, he said. Higgsfield, by contrast, is built for teams with budgets and deadlines, where speed and throughput are the real constraints.
“The key unlock is definitely the cost of the production, but also the velocity,” Mashrabov said. “On Higgsfield one person can easily produce 30 to 40 seconds of content every day. This velocity is important to stay on trend.”
Where Higgsfield fits—and where it doesn’t
That focus on velocity has caught the attention of ad agencies experimenting with how AI fits into modern production workflows.
“Higgsfield is a rapid prototyping engine for us–it lets our ideas become visible very fast. And for clients, that’s been a big game changer,” said Alex Foster, head of creative studio, Code and Theory. Higgsfield sits within the agency’s broader Creative Studios as is used for storyboard frames and making animatics with camera movements. Some of those prototypes ultimately graduate into final executions, after concepts are pressure‑tested before committing traditional production budgets.
“The fidelity [has] not always quite been there, but we saw the creative potential to it,” said David Dorsey, associate director, motion, Code and Theory. Features like the lips sync function or camera controls, such as dolly zoom presets, offer more creative direction than text prompting alone, he noted.
Still, Code and Theory doesn’t attempt to replace the entire production ecosystem with Higgsfield.
“AI is still not at a stage where it’s perfectly indistinguishable from live action or real motion, both in physics, in human reaction and emotion,” Foster said. Legal risks, such as copyright infringement, also shape how agencies choose which AI tools to use: Platforms like Adobe Firefly, which are designed to be safer for commercial use, are often used to develop characters or brand assets early, while tools like Higgsfield are brought in later for creative control and developing campaigns faster.
A director from WPP’s innovation team who wasn’t authorized to speak to media told ADWEEK that Higgsfield appeals to teams without deep prompt‑engineering expertise. The platform’s stylistic presets reduce guesswork, allowing people to generate editorial‑style visuals—high‑contrast lighting, wide cinematic angles—without crafting complex prompts. In practice, the executive said, Higgsfield is often used internally or presented to clients as conceptual groundwork for larger campaigns rather than final output.
In internal testing, WPP often runs identical prompts across competing systems, finding that results vary based on how each model has been trained. The question becomes less about which model is seen as “the best” and more about which produces the right creative outcome with the least friction.
Zero production tax
For Mashrabov, that flexibility is the point. He isn’t interested in the AI slop currently clogging feeds—those repetitive, uncanny-valley ads that feel like cheap replicas of a mid-2000s infomercial. Instead, he’s betting that the next era of advertising will be won net‑new concepts that are only possible with AI, making it easier to localize and adapt content across demographics and languages.
“We decrease production tax to zero with AI,” Mashrabov said.
Looking ahead, Higgsfield has plans to expand into performance marketing, allowing performance data to feed back into the content generation process and guide which variations are worth producing.
In an increasingly crowded AI video market—one that has pulled in more than $500 million in new funding in 2025 alone—Mashrabov is betting that marketers don’t need another black box but a system that helps ideas gain mass fast enough to matter.
“Marketing technology obviously has not been very popular across Silicon Valley venture firms,” Mashrabov said. “AI is going to create this renaissance opportunity specifically with the companies who advertise on social media.”
