Higgsfield, the AI video generation startup founded by former Snap exec Alex Mashrabov in 2023, announced Monday it has raised a $400 million Series B at a $5.4 billion valuation. That's a neat trick: quadrupling your worth in just eight months, when it was valued at a mere $1.3 billion. Because who needs gradual growth when you can just skip ahead?

The company, which lets users create AI images and videos, has been busy making headlines for premiering AI-generated movies at Cannes and in New York. It boasts tools like Cinema Studio for filmmakers directing AI films and Marketing Studio for marketing and advertising teams. In the press release announcing the round, Higgsfield proudly touted $700 million in annualized revenue and 30 million users across 200 countries. Because what's a startup without a few impressive numbers?

One growing market for the company has been enterprises - it now works with 390 of the Fortune 500. Mashrabov told TechCrunch that Higgsfield expects "enterprise adoption of video AI to become much more deeply embedded in everyday marketing and creative workflows." In other words, your next ad campaign might be directed by an algorithm.

The fresh capital will fund the usual business needs like hiring and product development. But it will also help pay for compute, which is apparently a big deal. "Video is one of the most compute-intensive domains in AI," Mashrabov explained. Just one minute of video is like processing 60,000 words. So securing reliable compute capacity has become a necessary expense to remain competitive with others in the industry like Synthesia and Runway. Because nothing says competitive like burning through cash on servers.

DST Global led the latest round, with many other investors piling in, including Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Valor Capital, and Tribe Capital. They're all betting that AI-generated videos will be the future of entertainment and marketing. Or at least that there's enough hype to keep the money flowing.