In late January, Tim Soret, a London-based video game director, received a message on social media site X from the marketing team at Higgsfield, a fast-growing AI video generation startup. “This is the biggest moment in Higgsfield history and we want YOU to be a part of it,” it read.

The $1.3 billion-valued startup, whose tools are used by some 15 million creators and ad agencies to churn out 4.5 million video clips every day, was about to launch a new tool called Vibe Motion, which uses AI models to convert text prompts into motion graphics. The offer: If Soret shared the startup’s social media post along with a video clip from pre-assembled marketing materials, the company would pay him $200.

But Soret, who has spent years designing graphics both manually and with AI tools, could tell something was off. The videos Higgsfield had shared with him lacked the "visual quirks” of AI, and he quickly realized that some clips in the media kit weren’t generated with AI at all. Instead, they were video templates that appear to have been lifted from stock site Envato on which the startup had pasted its own logos, according to videos and documents reviewed by Forbes. While Soret didn’t share the videos, others did, circulating the stock video templates on X to promote Higgsfield.

“All this hype is fake and it’s bought,” Soret told Forbes.

Higgsfield’s cofounder and chief strategy officer Mahi de Silva told Forbes the media kit was created by an employee in the startup’s marketing team for “ideation purposes” and was inadvertently shared with creators, saying the company’s processes went “haywire.” Envato did not respond to a comment request.

With its library of 400 presets of camera motions and visual effects, San Francisco-based Higgsfield offers an easy way for creators and advertisers to produce cinematic short videos through text-based prompts, product links or uploaded images. Its web app draws from 12 different top-tier AI video models, and it’s become so popular that Higgsfield is now the largest customer of OpenAI’s Sora 2 model in terms of both spend and usage.

“We fully admit that we push the envelope. We learn from what works on platforms like X, and very explicitly, it's more controversial content that gets attention.”

That’s translated into hockey stick revenue growth. Last month, the startup claimed it doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $200 million in just two weeks, driven largely by subscriptions from its 300,000 paying users. By early February, its annual revenue run rate crossed $300 million. CEO Alex Mashrabov told Forbes that he hopes to reach $1 billion in annual run rate by the end of the year. After raising $80 million in funding from prominent VC firms like Accel, GFT Ventures and Menlo Ventures in mid-January, the startup is now in talks to raise........

© Forbes