Nvidia Backs AI Video Startup Higgsfield, Extending $5.4 Billion Round

Nvidia has invested in Higgsfield, the San Francisco-based AI video and image generation startup, extending a Series B round that already raised $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation.

The company announced the new investments from Nvidia and the investment firm TCV on Friday, timed to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's visit to Kazakhstan, where much of Higgsfield's founding team comes from. Higgsfield declined to disclose the amounts. Kazakhstan's deputy prime minister and minister of AI and digital development, Zhaslan Madiyev, appeared alongside Huang in a photo released with the announcement.

The initial Series B, announced in August, drew investments from DST Global, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Tribe Capital, AI Capital Partners, Smash Capital, GFT Ventures and Valor Capital. Higgsfield said it hit $1 billion in annualized revenue in September.

What does the money buy?

For Higgsfield, the answer is credibility on two fronts at once: capital and compute. The startup runs its platform on Nvidia's infrastructure, processing 12 trillion tokens a month across 150 million generations. This is Nvidia's first investment in the company — though not its first in the space, having made two separate investments in Runway, the Lionsgate partner.

"Every brand, studio and creator now needs more visual content than traditional production can supply, and a new category is forming to meet that demand," Higgsfield CEO Alex Mashrabov said in a statement. "TCV has backed iconic companies that have transformed media, and Nvidia has powered every generation of our platform. With leaders from compute to media development we're well positioned to lead this new frontier."

Note what the statement does not say: how much money changed hands, or what Nvidia's stake buys it beyond a supplier relationship with a major customer.

Neil Tolaney, general partner at TCV, framed the bet around speed. "We believe Alex and the Higgsfield team are delivering on a powerful vision at a pace of product velocity and market adoption that we have rarely seen: a radically faster, professional-grade and AI-native mechanism for creators, brand marketers and agencies alike to turn ideas into images and video," he said.

Rev Lebaredian, Nvidia's vice president of physical AI simulation, tied the deal to the chipmaker's broader thesis. "AI factories produce intelligence in the form of tokens and the application layer is where those tokens become useful," he said in a statement. "The collaboration between Higgsfield and Nvidia across hardware and software is turning compute into creative work for millions of users and hundreds of the world's largest brands."

From toolmaker to studio

Founded in 2023, Higgsfield has positioned itself as a partner to entertainment studios, marketing clients and upstart filmmakers through its generative tools — even as it produces its own content. That dual role has drawn scrutiny.

In May, the company made a controversial splash with "Hell Grind," an AI-generated action-adventure film that premiered at the Marché du Film, the Cannes Film Festival's marketplace. It followed with the animated short "Kök Börü" and the action film "Cully Hill Boys," which featured the likenesses of streamer N3on and UFC fighters Israel Adesanya and Quinton "Rampage" Jackson.

The undisclosed sums leave the practical question open. What the deal most clearly changes is Nvidia's position: from vendor to shareholder in a company whose platform already depends on its chips.