Higgsfield, the AI video startup, has updated its AI Influencer Studio so that users can take a character they have designed and insert it into videos that already exist. Semafor reported the change on 7 October 2026. The studio itself is not new: it launched in January 2026, and this is an update to it.
The characters it produces look photorealistic but are built to be plainly not human, with geometric haircuts, stretched necks and exaggerated proportions. The tool offers more than 100 parameters covering identity, movement and style, and permits creatures, hybrids and animal characters with human traits. According to company documentation relayed by a Spanish outlet, a character keeps its identity across different scenes, outfits and lighting.
Some of the influencers created this way have gathered millions of views and thousands of followers across platforms, and reporting says certain users have used them to promote memecoins. Higgsfield's stated reasoning, as given to Semafor, is that a perfect human face is the quickest way for a synthetic character to look like generic AI output, so the oddness is a design choice and not a flaw in the model. Semafor goes on to present these uncanny figures as a more open use of the technology than deepfakes, because they do not try to pass as real people.
The wider pitch is that a recurring character can stand in for a human face on a social account. Semafor's report treats that as a cleaner proposition than a synthetic person posing as real, and the Spanish-language coverage notes that the same technology can be pointed at hybrids and anthropomorphic animals as easily as at humanoid figures. Neither outlet gives pricing or says when the update reaches every user.
The scale of the company is part of the story. Higgsfield says it has 30 million users and an annualised run rate of $1bn, a figure that sat at $300m at the start of the year. Those numbers are company-declared, and Bloomberg is cited for the billion-dollar figure. They also vary by source: user counts have appeared as 22 million in a June corporate document, more than 25 million on its website and 30 million in the press. Reported run-rate milestones climbed from $300m early in the year to $500m in June and $700m in August. YourStory reports a $400m raise at a $5.4bn valuation, up from $1.3bn in January.
Much of the detail beyond Semafor's short report comes from a Spanish-language write-up on WWWhat's New, which draws on YourStory, Bloomberg, Forbes and company documents and adds its own commentary, so the funding and revenue figures are second-hand and worth reading as the company's claims. The update also lands against a record of criticism. Forbes reported in February 2026 that Higgsfield's marketing team sent influencers AI-generated racist content as promotional material. On the rules side, Instagram is set to require labels on AI-generated influencer profiles, and EU AI Act marking duties apply from 2 August 2026. None of the company's own user or revenue figures is independently verified in either report.
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