Nvidia and TCV Buy Into Higgsfield, Extending Its $5.4 Billion Round

Higgsfield has extended its Series B with new cash from Nvidia and TCV, adding two heavyweight backers to a round that already raised $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation.

The San Francisco-based AI video and image generation company announced the investments Friday, timed to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's visit to Kazakhstan — the home country of much of Higgsfield's founding team. Higgsfield declined to disclose the size of the new checks. Kazakhstan's deputy prime minister and minister of AI and digital development, Zhaslan Madiyev, was pictured alongside Huang at the event.

Where does the money sit on the cap table?

The extension builds on the initial Series B Higgsfield announced in August, which drew DST Global, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Tribe Capital, AI Capital Partners, Smash Capital, GFT Ventures and Valor Capital. That round valued the company at $5.4 billion on $400 million raised.

The numbers underneath matter more than the headline. Higgsfield said it hit $1 billion in annualized revenue in September — a pace few generative AI startups of its vintage can claim. Founded in 2023, the company now runs 12 trillion tokens a month across 150 million generations on its platform, according to its own figures.

In short: two years from founding to a billion-dollar revenue run rate, at a $5.4 billion valuation.

What are the investors saying?

CEO Alex Mashrabov framed the deal as a bet on a new category. "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," 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."

Neil Tolaney, general partner at TCV, pointed to speed of adoption. "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," Tolaney said.

Why is Nvidia doubling down on AI entertainment?

This is Nvidia's first investment in Higgsfield, but not its first in AI entertainment. The chipmaker has previously made two separate investments in Runway, the Lionsgate partner. Higgsfield's platform already runs on Nvidia's infrastructure.

Rev Lebaredian, Nvidia's vice president of physical AI simulation, cast the deal in compute terms. "AI factories produce intelligence in the form of tokens and the application layer is where those tokens become useful," Lebaredian 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."

The through-line: Nvidia is buying equity in a company that burns its GPUs — 12 trillion tokens a month is a serious compute bill — while TCV gets exposure to a media-transforming play it says echoes its best past bets.

What has Higgsfield actually shipped?

The company positions itself as a partner to entertainment studios, marketing clients and upstart filmmakers through its generative tools, even as it produces its own content.

Its film record is short but loud:

• "Hell Grind," an AI-generated action-adventure film that premiered in May at the Marché du Film, the Cannes Film Festival's marketplace — a controversial splash in the industry
• "Kök Börü," an animated short film
• "Cully Hill Boys," an action film featuring the likenesses of streamer N3on and UFC fighters Israel Adesanya and Quinton "Rampage" Jackson

The studio work doubles as proof of concept for the toolset. If Higgsfield can make its own films with its own stack, it can sell that stack to brands and studios — or at least that's the pitch to its new investors.

The undisclosed extension amounts leave one open question: whether the new money moves the $5.4 billion valuation, or simply deepens Nvidia's grip on one of its fastest-growing customers.