Latest LinkedIn Post · AI Film Career Accelerator

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Higgsfield just raised $400M at a $5.4B valuation. Up 4x in 8 months.

Runway raised $315M at $5.3B. MiniMax IPO'd for $619M and is raising $2B more.

The AI video gold rush is real. But I don't think the smart money is where everyone's looking.

Here's the pattern, as someone who runs a directory sitting downstream of this whole industry:

→ The model layer is commoditizing FAST. A year ago "AI video" meant Sora. Sora's API shuts down next month. Veo, Kling, Seedance, Runway, Wan, Hailuo — they all converged on the same capabilities within months of each other. Category leadership here has a half-life measured in months, not years.

→ Meanwhile the real bottleneck is showing up somewhere else entirely. Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney. In the same few months, Disney licensed 200+ characters into Sora, and the MPA struck an IP deal with ByteDance. That's not contradictory — it's an industry paying, deal by deal, for a trust and rights-verification layer that doesn't exist yet as actual infrastructure.

→ The biggest buyer in the room just proved it. In July, Netflix paid $587M for InterPositive — Ben Affleck's AI production company, built in stealth since 2022, explicitly designed to keep filmmakers at the center of the process. Not a bigger model. A trust layer. Netflix also signed a first-look deal with Affleck and Matt Damon's studio separately. And it matches what's happening across VFX right now — the winning workflow is hybrid, real actors shot for real, AI builds the world around them, humans own the narrative and emotional judgment.

→ And demand is already way ahead of supply. 67% of brands are using AI video already. AI film festivals are turning into a real circuit. Everyone needs verified talent who can actually direct these tools toward something that matters. Almost nobody has a real way to find them.

Every creative-production boom eventually spins off this exact layer — the place that connects money to verified talent, separate from the tools. Stock media had it. Ad agencies built it. Traditional film has IMDB and Casting Networks.

AI filmmaking doesn't have that layer yet. That's what I built AIFD to be — and it's already two layers deep. AIFD is the verified directory. AI Filmmakers Career Agents is the 100+ member community underneath it, where creators build the actual skills and portfolio that make a verified profile worth trusting. Community builds capability, AIFD surfaces it, buyers hire directly.

Deliberately, no agency middleman in that loop, no placement commission — we're not licensed as a talent agency, and I don't want to be one. Giving creators the tools to represent themselves is a cleaner business than taking a cut of their work.

We're already seeing the signal at tiny scale — a company that's raised over $100M to build AI-powered film and storytelling platforms reached out to us earlier this month, looking for AI filmmaking and storytelling talent. Keeping them anonymous for now — but nobody pitched them. They found us.

The model layer will keep raising huge rounds and keep getting cheaper. Good — that's what grows the demand side. The discovery and trust layer on top of it is where I think the durable business gets built.

If that thesis makes sense to you, I'd like to talk.

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