Alex Mashrabov

Higgsfield's first product, a consumer mobile app, barely retained anyone. So Alex Mashrabov sat down with eight professional directors and commercial producers, and all eight independently named the same missing capability: camera controls for AI-generated video.¹ Mashrabov is the founder and CEO of Higgsfield, a company that builds AI-powered video and image generation tools for professional content creators, marketing teams, and brands. Higgsfield lets users generate short-form video and photoshoot-style imagery through both third-party and its own proprietary AI models, aimed at people who make social media content and advertising for a living rather than casual hobbyists. Before Higgsfield, Mashrabov sold an earlier startup to Snap and ran that company's generative AI efforts.

Background

Mashrabov was born and grew up in Andijan, a city in Uzbekistan's Fergana Valley. Both of his parents were professors of mechanical engineering, and the expected path for him was an academic or engineering track culminating in a PhD. He started programming around age 10 and became a competitive programmer, training in the sport-programming tradition common across the former Soviet Union. He competed at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals representing the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and later represented Innopolis University at a second World Finals appearance, describing top-three finishes worldwide in some contests.² He later attended UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Mashrabov has said his mother, who pointed him toward figures like Bill Gates as examples of people shaping how technology gets adopted, was his biggest early influence.²

Getting started

Mashrabov's path into generative AI ran through computer vision rather than video directly. He worked on an early startup doing OCR and form recognition, then moved into face recognition around 2014. Training a system to detect and reject Photoshopped images, he has said, was the moment he realized the same technology could create images that had never existed, rather than merely detect fakes.² That insight fed his next company, AI Factory, which built technology to run neural networks directly on mobile devices, a capability he says TikTok and Instagram lacked at the time. AI Factory's on-device inference became the engine behind Snap's real-time face filters, and Snap acquired the company in 2020 for approximately 166 million dollars, a deal Mashrabov has called partly speculative given how early generative AI still was.¹ He stayed on as Snap's head of Generative AI and watched TikTok grow into one of the world's most-used apps, concluding that the everyday content needs of social-media creators, especially the burnout of constant on-camera production, were going unaddressed. That conclusion became the founding premise for Higgsfield.

What he built

Mashrabov founded Higgsfield with an initial two-person team: a builder who could move from idea to working product within a day, and a partner focused on go-to-market and content.¹ The breakout came from those eight structured interviews. Higgsfield shipped camera controls in March 2024 and a visual-effects library the following month, then rode the growth of AI-native marketing agencies through the rest of that year on a release cadence of roughly six updates a week. It later hired four of its original eight interviewees. The product functions as a model aggregator, giving users access to outside video and image models such as Veo, Sora, and Kling alongside its own proprietary Soul image models. Higgsfield raised an 8 million dollar seed led by Menlo Ventures in April 2024, a 50 million dollar Series A led by GFT Ventures in September 2025 near a 1 billion dollar valuation, and an 80 million dollar Series A extension led by Accel in January 2026 that pushed its valuation to 1.3 billion dollars. By early 2026 it reported more than 15 million users and an annualized revenue run rate of roughly 200 million dollars within about nine months of its camera-controls launch, a pace Mashrabov has compared to the early growth of Slack and Zoom.¹

How he operates

Mashrabov describes a specific operating playbook for an AI-era company: assemble a small team, generate the first dollar of revenue within about 30 days, and reach roughly 1 million dollars in annualized revenue by day 90, deferring venture funding until that bar is cleared.¹ He tracks daily active users and average contract value rather than monthly active users, arguing MAU is easily inflated by virality. He treats major model releases from a handful of leading labs as forcing Higgsfield to substantially rebuild parts of its product on a rolling basis, a permanent condition of building in the category. Rather than compete head-on with labs racing to serve everyone, Mashrabov believes startups need a more nuanced set of customers, aiming Higgsfield at professional creators and marketing teams rather than casual TikTok users or Hollywood filmmakers. He credits his competitive-programming background for shaping how he evaluates talent, noting several early Higgsfield engineers come from the same pipeline he did. He frames Higgsfield's longer-term ambition as a "video reasoning engine" supporting outcome-based pricing tied to marketing results.¹

Where things stand

As of mid-2026, Mashrabov continues to lead Higgsfield as founder and CEO. The company was reportedly in talks for a new round valuing it at several times its 1.3 billion dollar January 2026 mark, a rise from an 8 million dollar seed less than two years earlier. Mashrabov expects the underlying technology to keep improving steadily rather than through a single imminent breakthrough, predicting the market will divide into a handful of large verticals each serving tens of millions of paying users by decade's end.² He has been named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 and continues to speak publicly, including to audiences in Central Asia, about Higgsfield and the broader shift toward AI-assisted content production.

Key facts

• Born and raised in Andijan, Uzbekistan, to two mechanical-engineering professors; began programming at age 10.
• Competed at the ACM ICPC World Finals representing MIPT and Innopolis University, describing top-three finishes worldwide in some contests.
• Founded AI Factory, an on-device neural-network startup behind Snap's real-time face filters; Snap acquired it in 2020 for approximately 166 million dollars, after which Mashrabov became Snap's head of Generative AI.
• Founded Higgsfield in 2024; its breakout feature, camera controls for AI video, came from eight customer interviews that unanimously flagged the same gap, four of whom Higgsfield later hired.
• Took Higgsfield from an 8 million dollar Menlo-led seed (2024) to a 1.3 billion dollar valuation on an 80 million dollar Series A extension (January 2026), with more than 15 million users and roughly 200 million dollars in annualized revenue.
• Named to Forbes' 30 Under 30.