Higgsfield Hits $1 Billion in Revenue as OpenAI Steps Aside
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
Higgsfield says it hit $1 billion in annualized revenue from AI video. OpenAI shut down Sora, and a smaller rival seems to be eating that demand.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI pulled the plug on Sora. Higgsfield, an 18-month-old startup, says it has already run its annualized revenue past $1 billion. CEO and co-founder Alex Mashrabov put the milestone on LinkedIn, and Bloomberg picked it up too. For a company that launched its platform only in March 2025, that is a very fast climb.
The pace is the real story. Mashrabov says Higgsfield grew 20x in a year. At the end of 2025, its run rate was about $200 million. By June 2026, it had reached $500 million, and by August it was at $700 million. Then came a $400 million Series B led by DST Global, which pushed the company’s valuation to $5.4 billion in eight months. The company also says enterprise adoption is growing 115 percent month over month, with fewer than 20 people on the enterprise team.
Higgsfield is not selling one magical model. It is selling a workflow wrapped around other people’s models. Customers subscribe or buy credits, and the company says annual subscriptions make up about 40 percent of revenue. Its products include Cinema Studio for filmmakers, Marketing Studio for campaign videos, and apps, templates, API access and agents. Mashrabov says about 70 percent of revenue now comes from creative agencies, not the individual creators the company first expected to lead demand.
The technical bet is simple enough to explain and hard enough to pull off: bundle the best video and image models, run several in parallel, and add controls for cameras, characters and consistency. Higgsfield currently lists models from ByteDance, Kuaishou, Google, Alibaba, xAI, Black Forest Labs and OpenAI on its site, plus its own Soul image model and an internal reasoning engine. That makes it useful — and also dependent on the companies underneath it.
The timing helped. OpenAI shut down Sora’s app, web version and later its API, just as Higgsfield was announcing its billion-dollar run rate. With Sora gone, there is more room for specialist tools. But the bigger test is whether a workflow layer can stay valuable when the model makers can sell straight to creators themselves.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the same old platform lesson with a new coat of AI paint: the company that owns the workflow often lasts longer than the company that only owns the shiny model. OpenAI can afford to wander off to the next core-biz brawl; everyone else has to actually make video production less annoying. That’s where the money usually is, and also where the receipts are less glamorous.
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