On Wednesday, Higgsfield AI, a video creation startup focused on social media, announced it raised $8 million in seed funding. Led by Menlo Ventures, the funding marks a milestone in the company’s mission of making advanced video creation tools accessible to creators worldwide through generative AI technology.

At the core of Higgsfield AI’s offerings is Diffuse, a proprietary video model that enables users to take selfies and make realistic human characters. The platform’s Prompt Builder allows users to create authentic video content via text prompts, reference images, or existing videos.

“Higgsfield is taking it one step further. We’re on a mission to make it possible for anyone and everyone to bring their ideas to life with video through easy-to-use, mobile-first tools that fit right into our daily lives,” Alex Mashrabov, co-founder and CEO of Higgsfield AI, said in the announcement.

Menlo Ventures Partner Amy Wu highlighted the startup’s potential. “Higgsfield AI is bringing video AI to the masses by making it possible for virtually anyone to be a creator and easily produce engaging, personalized, and sharable videos,” according to her.

Higgsfield AI has already launched Diffuse in India, South Africa, the Philippines, Canada, and Central Asia, with plans for a gradual global rollout. The company focuses on supporting social media content creators rather than generating feature-length videos.

“Our goal is to empower marketing departments for social media marketing,” Mashrabov told Decrypt. He said long production timelines are “impractical” for staying on top of social media trends, emphasizing the need for quick content production. 

Mashrabov, the former director of generative AI at Snap, co-founded Higgsfield AI last year after the social media giant acquired his startup AI Factory in 2018. 

The new funding will be used to refine Higgsfield AI’s mobile video model and address the issue of AI-generated deepfakes. The company’s “cartoony” animation style is a deliberate step to prevent the creation of realistic deepfakes until more robust authentication measures are in place.

“If you look at the app, most of the videos are sort of cartoony, and we made it that way on purpose,” Mashrabov said for Decrypt. “Because the cartoony type of content doesn’t pretend to be realistic, and it’s sort of a stepping stone for us before we introduce a more powerful and more realistic model.”

Higgsfield AI is also working to add artificial intelligence watermarking to the platform through collaborations with major social media platforms, aiming to make AI-generated content more authentic.