How a former Yandex employee created an AI video generator Higgsfield, which became the first unicorn startup in Kazakhstan with a valuation of $1 billion

In early October, the Higgsfield startup became the first startup in Kazakhstan to surpass the $1 billion valuation and enter the club. “unicorns”.

Higgsfield is an AI video and image creation platform that hosts multiple models. Thanks to this (and more), users can get the coolest AI videos of the moment.

Experts are confident that startups are the future, and the founders have no doubt that $1 billion is just the beginning.

BRIEFLY

What makes Higgsfield unique?

Higgsfield selects the capabilities of all the most advanced models, such as Sora 2, Nano Banana, Veo 3, Wan, MiniMax Hailuo 02, Seedance, Seedream, Kling and others.

The company takes the best from each model and combines them to create photos and videos.. This approach allows you to receive AI content in the highest possible quality. At the same time, users have the opportunity to create content using any of the integrated models. separately.

The service immediately shows examples of photos and videos that can be generated, thereby saving users from writing complex routines. This approach is called Click-to-Video, and it does not require any knowledge to create complex videos, as happens in Sora 2 and Veo. 3 that use text to video conversion.

In Higgsfield you can bring any photo to life.

There are ready-made templates on the Higgsfield website. To view the video, the user only needs to upload their photos. If desired, it can also be adjusted immediately, but this is more of an addition than a necessity.

In addition, having so many templates ensures that ideas are constantly identified and saves time. creation video.

All Higgsfield photo and video templates are divided into categories to make it easier to find the right one.

Higgsfield focuses on cinematic videos. The service’s library has many templates that simulate a real motion camera, for example, driving from a dolly (cart). zoom), under the crane (crane shot), FPV fly-bys and freezing effect (bullet time).

In addition to regular photo and video creation, users can draw on videos, create videos from their sketches using Sora 2, and display high-resolution images and videos.

To put it as simply as possible, Higgsfield is an AI-powered media combine that allows you to make full use of your capabilities. neural networks, even if you have never used them.

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Founder Higgsfield worked at Yandex

Alexander Mashrabov

Higgsfield was created by Alexander Mashrabov and Erzat Dulat.

Mashrabov is a graduate of MIPT, a finalist in the ICPC programming competitions in 2014 and 2016. From 2014 to 2015 he worked at Yandex, where he carefully developed technologies for searching and translating pages..

In 2018, together with his friend Grigory Tkachenko, Mashrabov created the AI ​​Factory company, developing additional effects. reality. In 2020, Snap acquired AI Factory for $166 million, after which Alexander headed the AI ​​direction at Snap.

In 2023, Mashrabov left Snap to found Higgsfield with Erzat Dulat as chief scientific officer. employee.

Erzat Dulat

Erzat is one of the leading machine learning experts in Kazakhstan. Before Higgsfield, he worked for large Kazakh companies such as Kaspi.kz, Kolesa and ERG, where they created machinery departments. training. Erzat is now an artificial intelligence researcher specializing in generative video.

The Higgsfield-based generative models were created by a team of 16 people in less than nine months. They trained on a cluster of 32 GPUs, which is quite a bit by industry standards.

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How to become a “unicorn” in two years

In 2024, Higgsfield attracted the first $8 million fund. Among the declines was venture fund Menlo Ventures, which previously invested in Anthropic.

Just over a year later, in September 2025, Higgsfield closed its second round of funding in the community. $50 million when assessing $1 billion.

Over the past 15 years, not a single company in our country has managed to achieve this.

Alexander Mashrabov, CEO of Higgsfield

The Astana Times added that “the announcement is an important milestone for Central Asia, supporting the growing role of the region.” in the global technological landscape.” This success coincided with Kazakhstan’s aggressive efforts to attract major tech players, which saw Pavel Durov open Telegram’s first AI lab here in October 2025.

The sharp rise in Higgsfield’s score drove his performance. In just five months after its launch, more than 11 million people registered with the service, and the total number of views of videos on social networks created in Higgsfield exceeded 1.2 billion. Mashrabov predicts that the startup’s annual revenue will exceed $50 million in 2025.

The main share of customers are in Japan, USA, South Korea and South Korea.

Major players are already actively interested in buying Higgsfield. This summer, the company rejected an offer to buy Meta (recognized as extremist and banned in Russia). According to rumors Zuckerberg’s company offered “several hundred million dollars” for the startup, but was rejected. Commenting on the publication, Erzat Dulat said that Higgsfield will become “at least 10 times more expensive in a year.”

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Why does Higgsfield compare better?

Today on the Internet there are many different photo and video generators, as well as services that allow you to work with several models at once. However, Higgsfield has no direct alternative.

All the most sophisticated AI models work on Text-to-Video and Text-to-Image models, meaning you definitely need to write the text that you want to receive. At Higgsfield you can immediately see what the outcome can be. All you have to do is upload only the necessary images.

Nor is Higgsfield’s goal to create the lowest cutting-edge AI model for video creation. In any case, there are no hints indicating this. To create Sora 2 and Veo 3 level models, the company will need a large staff, a large training and education area, and most importantly, colossal data center speeds.

Instead, Higgsfield is positioning itself as a portable media combiner for AI video, which is its key selling point. for the mass user. Many people support AI content on social media, but don’t know how to create it. Higgsfield solves this problem.

Higgsfield mainly attracts people who create content: bloggers, marketers, editors, artists and photographers. Unlike Veo 3 and Sora 2, Higgsfield’s templates allow them to quickly produce high-quality results.

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Key Findings

Higgsfield is the first Kazakh startup to become world famous. Within two years, the company reached a valuation of $1 billion and refused to sell to a large corporation.

Clearly, the creators are betting that AI videos will become more popular in the future, and with them, Higgsfield’s income and brand awareness will grow.

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