The term “unicorn” - used to describe startups valued at over $1 billion - was coined just ten years ago by Aileen Lee, when only 39 such companies existed. Today, with over 1,700 companies achieving that status, she might call them "rabbits." One of the newest, and arguably most precarious, additions to this exclusive club is the Kazakhstani AI video startup Higgsfield (higgsfield.ai).
While the company boasts millions of users and a coveted billion-dollar valuation, its future remains deeply uncertain.
The Pivot from Storytelling to Virality
A couple of years ago, founders Dulat and Mashrabov launched Higgsfield with the ambitious idea of creating a platform for generating long, cohesive video narratives. The vision was a "short film maker" where users could stitch together complex stories using AI-generated segments. The reality quickly set in: the output was inconsistent, technically challenging, and users ended up with nothing more than glitchy, animated images.
Higgsfield made a rapid and crucial pivot, shifting its focus entirely to short-form social media content. The service transformed into an aggregator of best-in-class Chinese video generation models. This strategic move, combined with hiring a talented team of marketers, cracked the code on virality - something from Higgsfield consistently lands in social media trends every week.
The result is millions of users, many of them paid subscribers, including not just everyday users but high-profile celebrities like Madonna, Will Smith, and Snoop Dogg, alongside several major brands.
The Unmet Mission and the Celebrity Glitch
Higgsfield's stated mission is noble: to lower the barrier to entry for AI. Their goal is to allow anyone, without complex prompting, to generate a compelling video by simply uploading an image and selecting an engaging preset.
However, the team's internal operations recently revealed a curious technological lapse. A major global star reached out to Higgsfield via email for a collaboration, but the message got lost in the shuffle. The star had to resort to contacting the company directly through social media to get a response.
In an era where even basic AI functions can monitor inboxes, filter spam, and flag high-priority messages, it’s ironic that a high-tech AI startup failed at fundamental email triage.
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The Billion-Dollar Problem: Lack of Competitive Edge
Despite the impressive user numbers and the flood of investor cash, the elephant in the room is the company’s long-term viability. Higgsfield is essentially a highly effective marketing layer on top of Chinese AI models.
The truth is stark: Higgsfield has successfully leveraged a trend with brilliant marketing, but it possesses no real technological competitive advantage.
While their current platform looks like a blockbuster compared to "dreary" alternatives like Neural Love, the underlying product—a curated collection of third-party generators - is vulnerable. Major tech giants like Google, Meta, and OpenAI will eventually integrate comparable or superior video generation capabilities directly into their own ecosystems, effectively eliminating the need for an aggregator.
We've seen this pattern before. While Midjourney held its ground for a long time, it is gradually being challenged by the increasing quality of corporate models. True long-term AI success, outside of heavily-backed giants like OpenAI, is typically found in utility - companies like Perplexity, which offers genuine, daily productivity benefits to users, rather than ephemeral viral content.
The most likely outcome is a profitable exit. Given co-founder Mashrabov's history of selling his previous startup, AI Factory, to Snapchat for $165 million, the founders of Higgsfield are expected to sell the company for a considerable sum soon.
They are talented entrepreneurs riding a powerful trend - a journey to billions atop a unicorn, racing headlong toward the inevitable burst of the AI bubble.
