// AI VIDEO GENERATION REVIEW

Haiper AI Review 2026: Honest Retrospective on the DeepMind Video Startup That Shut Its Doors

Haiper AI review 2026. Honest scoring of the text-to-video tool, what its 2.0 model could do, why the consumer app shut down, and what creators should use now.

Last verified · 2026-06-26 · by Moe Ameen
The verdict
2.2 / 5

Haiper AI was a genuinely capable text-to-video generator — its 2.0 model drew real praise for realism and motion in late 2024 — but the most important fact for any creator in 2026 is that you cannot use it. The consumer app shut down in February 2025 and the model now lives only inside NetMind.AI's enterprise API. As a tool to pick up today, it scores low purely on availability; as a cautionary tale about building a workflow on one model, it is worth understanding.

Most reviews end with "should you buy it?" This one has to start there, because the answer changes everything: you can't. Haiper AI shut down its consumer video app in February 2025, without warning. So this is a retrospective, not a buyer's guide — an honest look at what Haiper was, how good it actually got, why it ended, and what the episode tells a creator about where to put their trust in 2026.

That framing matters because Haiper wasn't a bad product. It was a well-funded London startup founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers, and its 2.0 model earned legitimate "watch out, OpenAI" headlines when it launched in October 2024. The model quality was real. The company still folded its creator business four months later.

We score Haiper on two tracks below: how the product performed when it was live, and what it's worth to you now. The first track is respectable. The second is close to zero, because a tool you cannot sign up for has no value to a working creator no matter how good the model was.

Everything here is reconciled against the public record — the founding and funding, the 2.0 and 2.5 releases, the February 2025 shutdown, the Microsoft hires, and the NetMind acquisition. Where a date or spec couldn't be confirmed from a primary source, we kept it general.

What Haiper AI is

Haiper AI was an AI video generation platform, founded in 2021 in London by Yishu Miao (CEO) and Ziyu Wang (CTO), both formerly at Google DeepMind. It emerged from stealth in March 2024 with a $13.8M seed round led by Octopus Ventures and a video foundation model. The consumer product turned a text prompt or a still image into a short clip — text-to-video, image-to-video, and video extension — with the strongest public release, Haiper 2.0, arriving on 28 October 2024 with templates, an HD upscaler, keyframe conditioning, and clips of roughly six seconds. A 2.5 model and a public API followed in December 2024, including an integration that put Haiper's model inside the VEED editor. The company shut its consumer business in February 2025. Cofounders Miao and Wang, plus ML researcher Edward Hayes, joined Microsoft AI in March 2025 to work on multimodal generative systems — reported as a talent move rather than an acquisition. By mid-2025, Haiper's video models were sold to NetMind.AI, a decentralized AI-compute company that folded them into its B2B inference platform. The model survives there; the creator-facing Haiper.ai does not.

Who Haiper AI is for

In 2026, Haiper is for essentially no individual creator, because there is no consumer product to use — that is the honest ICP answer. The only party for whom "Haiper" still means something usable is an enterprise that wants to license the underlying model through NetMind.AI for inference at scale. For everyone who originally used Haiper — solo creators, marketers, small teams generating short clips from prompts — the practical takeaway is to migrate to a live tool, ideally one that owns more of the workflow than a single text-to-video box ever did.

Scoring breakdown

DimensionScoreWhy
Video generation quality (when live)3.8 / 5Haiper 2.0 earned real praise for realism and motion in late 2024; genuinely competitive for its moment.
Range of generation modes3.5 / 5Text-to-video, image-to-video, and video extension, plus templates and a text-to-image mode — a solid spread.
Ease of use (consumer app)4.0 / 5The browser app was simple: prompt or image in, clip out, with templates lowering the barrier.
Output length & finish2.5 / 5Clips capped around six seconds, with no captions or sizing — a raw render, not a finished post.
Publishing & workflow1.5 / 5None. Haiper generated a file; captioning, reframing, scheduling, and posting were all on you.
Current availability for creators1.0 / 5The consumer app is shut down. There is no creator sign-up in 2026 — the single biggest mark against it.
Company stability & longevity1.0 / 5Closed its creator business without warning four months after its flagship release; founders left for Microsoft.
Value to a creator today1.5 / 5A model you cannot use has little practical value; only relevant to enterprises via NetMind.

Pros and cons

Pros

  • The 2.0 model was genuinely strong for late 2024 — realism and motion drew "watch out, OpenAI" coverage.
  • Covered the modes creators wanted: text-to-video, image-to-video, and video extension.
  • Templates, an HD upscaler, and keyframe conditioning made it more than a bare prompt box.
  • Simple, approachable browser app that lowered the barrier to generating a first clip.
  • Serious pedigree — two ex-DeepMind founders and real funding — which showed in output quality.
  • The model lives on inside NetMind.AI for enterprises that want to license inference.

Cons

  • The consumer product is discontinued — you cannot sign up or generate clips as a creator in 2026.
  • Shut down in February 2025 with no warning, stranding anyone who built a routine on it.
  • Only ever produced clips — no captions, reframing, scheduling, publishing, or text formats.
  • Clip length capped around six seconds, short for a finished social post.
  • A single in-house model meant a single point of failure, which is how it failed for users.
  • The surviving NetMind path is enterprise B2B, not usable by an individual creator.

Pricing analysis

Pricing is largely a historical question now. While live, Haiper offered a free tier plus paid plans for higher limits and faster generation — typical for the text-to-video category in 2024. For what the model could do at the time, that was a fair deal, and the free tier made it easy to try.

In 2026, there is no consumer pricing because there is no consumer product. The model's only commercial path is through NetMind.AI's B2B platform, which is priced for enterprise inference, not individual creators — you would contact NetMind rather than pick a plan. For a working creator, the effective "price" of Haiper is that there is nothing to buy.

That is the real pricing lesson, and it's not about dollars. The cost of building on Haiper turned out to be the entire workflow when the app closed. A tool that is cheap or free but can disappear is more expensive than it looks — which is the case for evaluating any single-model video app on its staying power, not just its sticker price.

Use-case fit

Use caseFitWhy
Generating short text-to-video clips todayWeakThe consumer app is shut down; you cannot generate anything as a creator. Use a live tool instead.
Enterprise licensing of the model via NetMindOKThe technology still exists inside NetMind.AI for businesses integrating inference at scale — not creators.
Finished, captioned, posted social videoWeakEven when live, Haiper stopped at a raw clip — no captions, sizing, scheduling, or publishing.
Talking-head or avatar videoWeakHaiper never produced avatar or talking-head formats; it was prompt-to-clip only.
Turning one source into many cross-platform postsWeakNo fan-out, no text/image/blog formats — a single clip with everything still to do to it.
A durable, long-term posting workflowWeakThe February 2025 shutdown is the direct evidence against betting a routine on a single model.

Alternatives worth considering

  • Kompozy — not a single text-to-video model but a content engine: it generates video (avatar shorts, clipped shorts, listicle videos), then captions, reframes, schedules, and publishes across nine platforms, so no one model's shutdown breaks your workflow.
  • HeyGen — if your need is specifically talking-head avatar video from a script, it is the category leader and still very much live.
  • A current text-to-video model (e.g. a leading 2026 generator) — if you want a like-for-like prompt-to-clip replacement and will handle captions, sizing, and posting yourself.
  • VEED — the editor that once embedded Haiper's model; useful if you want generation and editing in one browser tool.

How Kompozy compares

The honest comparison isn't "Kompozy vs Haiper," because they were never the same kind of tool — and that distinction is exactly what Haiper's shutdown makes relevant. Haiper was a single model with a thin app on top: prompt in, clip out. Kompozy is a content engine. It generates video through multiple paths — HeyGen avatar Persona Shorts, clipped shorts from long-form, listicle videos over stock footage, marketing-short composites — and then does everything Haiper left undone: branded captions, per-platform reframing, fan-out into images and text and blogs and newsletters, scheduling, and publishing to nine platforms.

The structural difference is the whole point. Because Kompozy routes generation across several providers and owns the publishing layer, no single model going offline can take your workflow down — the precise failure that ended Haiper for its users. If you're reading a Haiper review in 2026, you're almost certainly looking for what to use instead; the most defensible answer is to stop building on one model and build on the engine that owns the pipeline around it. That's not a knock on Haiper's model, which was good. It's the lesson its shutdown handed every creator who relied on it.

Frequently asked questions

Is Haiper AI worth it in 2026?

Not for a creator, because you cannot use it — the consumer app shut down in February 2025. The model now lives only inside NetMind.AI's enterprise platform. As a tool to pick up today it isn't a viable option; you would choose a live alternative instead.

What happened to Haiper AI?

Haiper closed its consumer video business in February 2025. In March 2025 its cofounders Yishu Miao and Ziyu Wang, plus ML researcher Edward Hayes, joined Microsoft AI — reported as a talent move rather than an acquisition. By mid-2025 its video models were sold to NetMind.AI for enterprise inference, and the creator product was discontinued.

Was Haiper AI any good?

Yes, for its time. Its 2.0 model, launched in October 2024, earned real praise for realism and motion, and it covered text-to-video, image-to-video, and video extension with templates and an HD upscaler. The quality was competitive; the company's staying power was not.

Who made Haiper AI?

It was founded in 2021 in London by Yishu Miao (CEO) and Ziyu Wang (CTO), both former Google DeepMind researchers. It came out of stealth in March 2024 with a $13.8M seed round led by Octopus Ventures, with 5Y Capital participating.

Can I still access Haiper's model anywhere?

Only through NetMind.AI, the decentralized AI-compute company that bought Haiper's video models in mid-2025 and integrated them into its B2B platform. That is an enterprise inference API, not a consumer tool an individual creator can sign up for.

What should I use instead of Haiper AI?

For a raw text-to-video clip, any current generator works. If your goal is publishing consistently, a content engine like Kompozy is more durable — it generates video itself, captions and reframes it, fans one source into many formats, and publishes across nine platforms, so a single model's shutdown can't strand you again.

Did Microsoft buy Haiper AI?

No. Microsoft hired Haiper's cofounders and a lead researcher in March 2025 to work on multimodal generative AI — widely reported as a talent move rather than an acquisition of the company. Haiper's actual video models were separately sold to NetMind.AI later in 2025.

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