The office is unremarkable in the way the best ones often are: nine floors above a Soviet-era courtyard, three rooms, a single conference table covered in laptops. What is unusual is the team. Average age, 26. Average years of experience at a global tech company, four.
They did not start here. The founder spent his twenties in San Francisco, then Singapore, then back to Almaty for what he describes, without irony, as the easier market. "The hard part is not technical," he says. "The hard part is being legible to people who have never visited."
Alibek Tursynov
- Born
- Almaty, 1996
- Education
- NU Astana, Stanford
- Previous
- Stripe, ex-Google
Tursynov was the first hire on the early payments team at a regional super-app before leaving in 2023 to start his own company. He raised in three days.
The company
An $80m extension closed two months later.
"The hard part is not technical. The hard part is being legible to people who have never visited."
The product roadmap is unusually long for a company at this stage — three years out, mapped to the quarter. The CEO walks through it the way someone might walk through a recipe they have made a hundred times. Calm, ordered, unselfconscious.
Higgsfield AI
Generative video for creative professionals
- Founded
- 2023
- HQ
- Almaty / SF
- Headcount
- 37
- Stage
- Series A
Higgsfield builds generative video tooling aimed at agencies and indie filmmakers. Its v3 model, released in Q1 2026, drew the first round of meaningful European agency contracts.
Behind that calm is a hard-won bet about what the next decade of the region looks like. "We are the most exportable thing this market has ever made," he says. "And we are still small. That is the part nobody outside is pricing in."
That is the bet, in one sentence. And as of last week, with the announcement of an extension round, the bet is paying off.
