Sand.ai, a Beijing startup that builds video-generation models, announced a $200m Series A+ round on 5 November 2026, extending its Series A. CoStone Capital and Wangsu Science & Technology, a Shenzhen-listed IT infrastructure company, jointly led the round, according to DealStreetAsia and TechNode.
The company said the round values it at more than $1bn. TechNode noted that the valuation was supplied by the company and is not independently verified. It is Sand.ai's third round of 2026, and the company said it has raised $300m over the past 10 months.
Who invested
Several investment firms, state-owned Pudong Venture Capital Group and an investment arm of Shanghai International Group joined the round, DealStreetAsia reported. Existing investors iMPC (formerly Matrix Partners China), CAS Star and HyT Capital reinvested. The mix includes industry capital, government funding, yuan-denominated funds and US dollar investors.
Wangsu disclosed its own commitment in a Shenzhen exchange filing on 29 September: RMB300m (about $44.5m) through a convertible note and warrants for Series A+ preferred shares, according to TechNode. It would hold about 4.4% of Sand.ai after other investors subscribe. Agreements were signed on 16 October, and Wangsu would get priority deployment of Sand.ai's new models through its infrastructure, subject to the agreements.
What Sand.ai does
Sand.ai was founded in early 2024 by Cao Yue, a Tsinghua PhD graduate and former principal researcher at Microsoft Research Asia who co-authored the Swin Transformer. In 2023 he co-founded Light Year with Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen, and Meituan acquired it for $281m that June, DealStreetAsia reported.
Its models include Magi-1, an autoregressive video-generation model, and GAGA-1, which generates audio and video together. MAGI-2 Preview is a 114-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, released as an open-source research version, with an official version planned soon. Its paid service, VidMuse, makes music videos, product ads and anime dramas. Sand.ai said VidMuse passed $10m in annual recurring revenue within two months of its January launch; TechNode noted that this figure is unaudited.
What the money is for, and the funding so far
Both outlets say the funds will go to video foundation-model research and training, inference infrastructure, product iteration and expansion abroad.
DealStreetAsia reported that Sand.ai raised more than $100m across two rounds less than five months before this one. Earlier backers include Lollapalooza Capital, the family office of Wang Huiwen, as well as IDG Capital, Baidu Ventures and Sinovation Ventures, which is led by Kai-Fu Lee.
TechNode put the round in the context of a fast-moving field: Kuaishou's Kling AI unit completed a financing of about RMB19.8bn in October, with Kuaishou keeping control of the business. Neither outlet quotes Sand.ai executives or investors on the deal.
The round comes just before the planned official release of MAGI-2, which DealStreetAsia said is due soon. The sources do not disclose Sand.ai's headcount or any revenue beyond the VidMuse figure, and the company's total funding is not stated beyond the $300m raised in 2026.