Higgsfield announced Monday that it has raised a $400 million Series B at a $5.4 billion valuation. This new round is just eight months after nabbing a $1.3 billion valuation.  

Higgsfield, founded by former Snap exec Alex Mashrabov in 2023, lets users create AI images and videos. It made headlines this past year for premiering AI-generated movies at both Cannes and in New York. It has tools like the Cinema Studio to help filmmakers direct AI films and the Marketing Studio for marketing and advertising teams. In a release announcing the round, the company touted $700 million in annualized revenue and 30 million users across 200 countries. 

One growing market for the company has been enterprises. It is now working with 390 of the Fortune 500, it said. Mashrabov told TechCrunch that Higgsfield expects “enterprise adoption of video AI to become much more deeply embedded in everyday marketing and creative workflows.”

The fresh capital will fund the usual business needs like hiring and product development. But it will also help pay for compute. “Video is one of the most compute-intensive domains in AI,” Mashrabov explained. Just one minute of video is like processing 60,000 words. Securing reliable compute capacity has therefore become a necessary expense to remain competitive with others in the industry like Synthesia and Runway.

DST Global led the latest round, with many other investors piling in including Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Valor Capital, and Tribe Capital.

The government’s spyware playbook has had one big problem for the public: there has been no reliable count of how often it is used.

That is set to change as U.S. federal courts prepare to track spyware and hacking-based communications interceptions in a new category of the annual Wiretap Report.

The development matters because spyware can put investigators much closer to the source of a person’s communications than conventional network interception can. Yet while the judiciary has published detailed statistics on court-authorized wiretaps for decades, those reports have not separately shown how many specifically involved government spyware techniques.

The figures to come will still leave some questions unanswered. But they will give lawmakers, researchers and the public something they have largely lacked: a number that can be tracked from one year to the next.

What the agreement introduces

According to TechCrunch, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts will add a “spyware/hacking” category to the annual Wiretap Report. That will allow courts to separately count cases in which hacking techniques are authorized to intercept communications.

Spyware is a form of malware designed to secretly monitor or collect information from a device, and its capabilities can go far beyond simply reading messages.

Depending on the tool, it can give an attacker access to communications, files, location data, screenshots, and even a device’s camera or microphone. That makes spyware particularly powerful in the hands of threat actors.

The new report category, however, would not create a public record of individual spyware operations and will not necessarily capture every government use of hacking tools, such as a remote search for information already stored on a device. That leaves a significant portion of government hacking activity still outside the public view.

There are also timing and scope limits. The new category will start with 2028 data and will not disclose to the public how extensively government agencies have used spyware in previous years.

Privacy advocates welcome the change

Despite the apparent limitations, government surveillance and privacy advocates have lauded the effort.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Sen. Ron Wyden said he is “thankful that the federal courts agreed to collect and publish data about hacking.” Wyden also suggested that this is the starting point, citing the “Government Surveillance Transparency Act” he and others reintroduced earlier this year.

Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the use of spyware surveillance a “problem,” while noting that the development will bring greater accountability on its use.

Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Center for Democracy, said it was a “long overdue” transparency step.

Why this development matters

The decision could give privacy advocates in other regions a stronger case for demanding similar transparency from their governments, particularly as spyware capabilities increasingly become advanced.

But transparency also has a security side: while these aggregate figures should not give hackers a playbook, the development would make government surveillance records — which are already highly targeted — even more valuable to threat actors.

For individuals, however, the more important consequence is what the data could eventually expose about the scale and reach of device surveillance — information that can be used to challenge excessive or unlawful monitoring and push for stronger safeguards.

The consequences of device surveillance can also extend beyond the person being targeted. Access to a compromised device may expose communications involving journalists’ sources, lawyers’ clients, colleagues, relatives and other contacts.

The value of the new reporting category is therefore less about revealing individual government operations and more about establishing a public baseline for how frequently one of the most intrusive forms of digital surveillance is being authorized.

Other News: The White House is pushing for greater scrutiny of AI model safety as the government weighs how advanced systems should be evaluated before deployment. 

Reddit recently said it would bring most viral stories to life through a new “video Reddit” experience, allowing users to listen to Reddit posts in the background while doing other tasks and activities. On Monday, Reddit will begin testing an initial version of this experience with both video and audio posts across select communities to see which type of posts resonate with its users and have the potential to scale.

The company first announced its plans for narrated Reddit videos during its second-quarter earnings call in July, when CEO Steve Huffman told analysts on the quarterly call that people were already consuming Reddit content like this on other platforms.

He was referring to how other social media platforms, like TikTok and Meta’s Reels, often feature popular Reddit stories narrated through a text-to-speech feature or read aloud by creators. Some of those videos display the words on screen as they’re read or are accompanied by unrelated footage, like video gameplay or cooking content.

“There is an emerging content type elsewhere on the internet of, basically, podcasts where people read Reddit content,” Huffman explained on the call. “I think this version of, like, listened-to or spoken Reddit can be really engaging, as well,” he added.

Reddit tells TechCrunch the initial tests are early, limited experiments meant to provide the company with a better understanding of how these formats can be useful to users, and whether they can be done in a way that feels authentic to Reddit. Users will be able to choose whether they want to “read” or “play” a post, when available.

The test will focus only on select English-language posts for the time being, and will be accessible through Reddit’s iOS and Android apps.

The different formats will not replace the original, text-only post, Reddit notes. Both the original post and the comments can still be viewed and engaged with as before. Instead, Reddit suggests that people may sometimes want to listen to Reddit audio while exercising, walking, or running errands, while others might want to watch written conversations come to life through video and audio combined.

This isn’t the first time Reddit has experimented with video. The company in earlier years rolled out native video hosting and tried various iterations of a TikTok-style video feed. More recently, Reddit launched support for video in comments, which it says now accounts for more than 10% of video posts on its platform.