Snap paid $166 million for Alex Mashrabov’s first company, then put him in charge of its own AI team. That’s usually where this kind of story ends — a good exit, a comfortable executive job, a long and quiet tenure at someone else’s company. Mashrabov left anyway. Three years later, the company he started instead was worth more than thirty times what Snap had paid him the first time around.
A Snapchat filter company, sold for $166 million
Mashrabov grew up in Kazakhstan, studied computer science at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and worked as a machine-learning engineer at Yandex on search, according to Russian financial outlets finance.mail.ru and investfuture.ru. In 2018 he co-founded AI Factory with Victor Shaburov and Grigory Tkachenko — a startup building real-time face animation and AR effects, the technology behind what Snapchat would later ship as its Cameos feature. Snap acquired AI Factory in January 2020 for $166 million, as TechCrunch, Tubefilter and SiliconANGLE all reported at the time. Mashrabov didn’t cash out and disappear; he joined Snap and ended up leading its generative-AI work.
Starting over, alone, in the fall of 2023
He left Snap in 2023 to co-found Higgsfield with Yerzat Dulat, a Kazakh machine-learning researcher, building a browser-based platform for generating and editing AI video — turning text and images into clips, controlling camera movement and effects without a camera. It launched into the same consumer wave that had made text-to-image tools briefly ubiquitous a year earlier: a free, viral product, aimed at individual creators and social teams rather than enterprises. It worked. Higgsfield closed a $50 million Series A in September 2025, then extended it to $130 million within a few months. By around January 2026, TechCrunch reported the extension valued the company at $1.3 billion, with annualized revenue at $200 million — double what it had been roughly two months before — and more than 15 million users nine months after launch.
The pivot: from viral clips to the Fortune 500
A consumer-viral product has a ceiling, and Mashrabov moved before the company hit it. In January 2026, business customers made up less than a quarter of Higgsfield’s revenue, according to CityAM’s reporting. By August, enterprise customers — 390 of them from the Fortune 500 — accounted for the majority. CityAM named Dollar Shave Club as one example, using the platform to generate multiple marketing videos a day rather than commissioning a production shoot for each one. Annualized revenue reached $700 million in August 2026, up from about $20 million a year earlier — a roughly 35-fold increase in twelve months — while the user base crossed 30 million across 238 countries, per CityAM and The Next Web’s reporting on the round.
What $5.4 billion buys
That growth brought a $400 million Series B, closed in August 2026 and led by DST Global, with Goldman Sachs’ equity growth fund, Intel Capital, Liberty Global Tech Ventures, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Tribe Capital, Smash Capital, Fifth Wall, Valor Capital and Mirae Asset Capital also participating. The round valued Higgsfield at $5.4 billion — four times its valuation eight months earlier. Supermodel and impact investor Natalia Vodianova joined the company as an adviser around the same time, citing her network across fashion, beauty and the creative industries, according to the startup-profile outlet StartupIntros. Asked by the Financial Times what the new money was for, Mashrabov was direct, as quoted by both CityAM and The Next Web: “The new funding will help us accelerate our move upmarket.”
The billionaire question, and the cost of getting there
Mashrabov holds roughly 20% of Higgsfield, according to Russian financial outlets finance.mail.ru and investfuture.ru, both reporting on August 19, 2026 that the stake — worth a little over $1 billion at the new valuation — could make him a first-time entrant on Forbes’ Russian billionaires list. It would be a second Forbes appearance: he was named to the magazine’s Russian 30 Under 30, Science and Technology category, in 2020, the same year Snap’s acquisition of AI Factory closed. Mashrabov has also been candid about what the growth has demanded internally. At the Digital Bridge forum, in comments reported by the Kazakh outlet The Tech, he described Higgsfield’s operating pace bluntly: “At Higgsfield, it makes no sense to work less than 100 hours a week — and this isn’t about numbers, but about the team’s full commitment.” It’s a founder’s own account of the price of a 35x year, not an outside observer’s — and worth reading as exactly that.
Mashrabov had already taken the safe version of this story once: sell the company, take the job running AI for the company that bought it, let someone else carry the risk. He walked away from that job to build something uncertain again, bet the second time on enterprise clients over viral growth when the first bet stopped being enough, and ended up with a stake worth more than six times what Snap paid for his first company — on paper, and only if Higgsfield’s growth holds.
Related founders
- Amjad Masad Stopped Teaching People to Code. Revenue Grew 50x. — another founder who reversed his company’s original pitch to chase a bigger, faster-growing market.
- Maor Shlomo Built Base44 Alone. Wix Bought It for $80M, Six Months Later. — a faster, smaller version of the same AI-boom trade: build something that compounds fast, sell before the window closes.
- Yasser Elsaid Built Chatbase to $10M ARR, No VC, No Sales Team — a bootstrapped counterpoint: no venture money, no $5.4 billion valuation, and the same AI wave driving the growth.
Alex Mashrabov’s education, early career at Yandex, and Kazakhstani background are per finance.mail.ru and investfuture.ru, both reporting August 19, 2026. AI Factory’s 2018 founding with Victor Shaburov and Grigory Tkachenko, and Snap’s January 2020 acquisition of the company for $166 million, are per TechCrunch, Tubefilter and SiliconANGLE’s contemporaneous reporting. Higgsfield’s fall 2023 founding with Yerzat Dulat, its Series A history, its $1.3 billion valuation and its revenue and user figures as of around January 2026 are per TechCrunch’s January 2026 reporting. The August 2026 $400 million Series B, its $5.4 billion valuation, its investor list, Higgsfield’s $700 million annualized revenue and prior-year $20 million figure, its 30 million-plus users, its enterprise-customer growth and the Dollar Shave Club example are per CityAM and The Next Web, both reporting on the round; Mashrabov’s quote to the Financial Times is as relayed by both outlets. Natalia Vodianova’s advisory role is per StartupIntros’ profile of her. Mashrabov’s estimated 20% ownership stake, its approximate $1 billion-plus value, and the Forbes Russian-billionaires and 30-Under-30 reporting are per finance.mail.ru and investfuture.ru. Mashrabov’s quote on Higgsfield’s working hours is per the Kazakh outlet The Tech’s report on the Digital Bridge forum. No Creative Commons or public-domain photograph of Alex Mashrabov was found on Wikimedia Commons; this post ships with a typographic card in place of a photograph.
