Sand.ai, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup specialising in video generation, announced on Thursday the completion of a Series A extension round at $200 million to achieve the unicorn status with a valuation of over $1 billion.
For this Series A+ round, the Beijing-based startup attracted a diverse group of investors representing industry capital, government funding, domestic Chinese yuan funds and US dollar investors.
Chinese investment firm CoStone Capital and Shenzhen-listed IT infrastructure company Wangsu Science & Technology jointly led the deal.
Multiple investment firms, alongside state-owned Pudong Venture Capital Group and an investment arm of Shanghai International Group, participated in the Series A+ round. Existing investors such as iMPC, formerly Matrix Partners China, CAS Star and HyT Capital re-upped, according to a company announcement.
Marking its third funding round in 2026, the Series A+ round brought Sand.ai’s fundraising total over the past 10 months to $300 million.
The new financing came less than five months after the startup raised over $100 million across two funding rounds. Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen’s family office Lollapalooza Capital; IDG Capital; Baidu Ventures (BV); and Sinovation Ventures, led by former Google China head Dr Kai-Fu, were among the earlier investors.
Founded in early 2024 by Tsinghua PhD graduate Cao Yue, Sand.ai leverages generative video models to lower costs, accelerate turnaround times and democratise high-quality video content creation for everyone.
The startup has developed Magi-1, an autoregressive video generation model; GAGA-1, a model for simultaneous audio-visual generation; and more recently, MAGI-2 Preview, as an open-source research release.
On the application front, its VidMuse, a paid AI video creation service with tools for music videos, product ads and anime dramas, achieved an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of over $10 million within just two months of launch this January.
The fresh capital will see Sand.ai invest in video foundation model R&D and training, inference infrastructure building, product iteration and global market expansion. It also plans to introduce the official version of MAGI-2 in the near term.
Prior to Sand.ai, Cao co-founded AI company Light Year alongside Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen in February 2023. Just four months later, Meituan acquired Light Year in June 2023 for $281 million.
