AI · November 9, 2026
Sand.ai Raises $200 Million in Series A+ Funding
Sand.ai, a Chinese artificial intelligence video generation startup, has completed a Series A+ funding round worth 200 million USD. The company announced this development on November 5, 2026, which pushed its valuation above the 1 billion USD threshold and officially classified it as a unicorn.
The new capital was secured from a diverse group of investors, including industrial capital, government-backed investment institutions, RMB funds, and USD investors. CoStone Capital and Wangsu Science & Technology, an internet infrastructure company listed in Shenzhen, jointly led the round. Pudong Venture Capital and investment entities under the Shanghai International Group also participated. Existing shareholders, including iMPC, CAS Star, and HyT Capital, continued to invest in the company.
This transaction marks the third funding round completed by Sand.ai in 2026. Over the past ten months, the company has accumulated 300 million USD in total funding. Earlier this year, Sand.ai raised over 100 million USD through two separate rounds in a period of less than five months. Previous investors in the company include Lollapalooza Capital, IDG Capital, Baidu Ventures, and Innovation Works.
Founded in early 2024, Sand.ai is headquartered in Beijing. The company utilizes generative video models to reduce production costs and shorten content creation cycles. Its goal is to enable individuals and businesses to produce high-quality video content with a lower barrier to entry.
The company has released several video generation models. Magi-1 uses an autoregressive architecture to generate video content step by step. GAGA-1 focuses on the synchronized generation of audio and video, aiming for integrated audiovisual creation. Recently, Sand.ai released the MAGI-2 Preview as an open-source research preview to demonstrate the technical progress of its next-generation model.
In terms of commercialization, the company's paid AI video creation platform, VidMuse, has achieved initial success. Launched in January, the platform provides generation tools for music videos, product advertisements, and anime short dramas. Within two months of its launch, its annual recurring revenue surpassed 10 million USD. This performance indicates that AI video generation technology is moving beyond model demonstrations and research experiments, with some products now capable of generating direct market revenue.
The funds from this round will be primarily used for the research and training of video foundation models, the construction of inference infrastructure, product iteration, and global market expansion. The company also plans to launch the official version of MAGI-2 in the near future to further refine its video generation model product system.
Sand.ai's entry into the unicorn club reflects the capital market's continued focus on the commercial prospects of AI video generation technology. Unlike large technology companies that rely on massive computing power and comprehensive platforms, Sand.ai aims to establish its own market space through a focus on video foundation models, open research models, and paid creation tools. The actual performance of MAGI-2, the ability of VidMuse to sustain revenue growth, and the company's expansion in overseas markets will be key factors in testing whether its high valuation is supported.