Chinese video-generation startup Sand.ai has completed a $200 million Series A+ financing round, adding another large capital injection to China’s increasingly competitive generative video sector.
The Beijing-based company announced the closing on November 5. CoStone Capital and Shenzhen-listed Wangsu Science & Technology jointly led the round. Other participants included Chinese venture firms, state-backed investors and existing shareholders.
Sand.ai said the round brought its fundraising over the past 10 months to $300 million and pushed its valuation above $1 billion. The valuation and cumulative fundraising figures are company-supplied.
The company plans to use the proceeds for video foundation-model research, training and inference infrastructure, product development and international expansion. It also plans to release the full version of its MAGI-2 model in the near term.
Wangsu investment backed by exchange filings
Wangsu’s participation had been disclosed before the broader round closed. In a September 29 filing with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the company said it planned to invest RMB300 million, or about $44.5 million, in Sand.ai through a convertible note and warrants for Series A+ preferred shares.
Wangsu said the arrangement would give it about 4.4 percent of Sand.ai after the other investors completed their subscriptions. An October 19 progress filing said the parties had signed the convertible-note and preferred-share agreements on October 16.
The exchange disclosures describe Sand.ai as a developer of video-generation models and applications. Wangsu said the companies intended to work together on audio and video inference, low-latency edge inference and enterprise deployment. The filing also said Sand.ai’s new models and related technologies would receive priority deployment through Wangsu’s infrastructure, subject to the parties’ agreements.
Video models and creator tools
Sand.ai was founded in 2024 and is led by Cao Yue, a former principal researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and a co-author of the Swin Transformer computer-vision architecture.
The startup develops the MAGI family of video models and VidMuse, a paid creation service for music videos, advertisements and animated content. Its official website says MAGI-2 Preview is a 114-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that jointly generates audio and video. The company says VidMuse reached more than $10 million in annualized recurring revenue within two months of launch; that figure has not been independently audited.
The financing follows another large transaction in China’s generative video market. Kuaishou’s Kling AI unit completed an approximately RMB19.8 billion financing in October, while Kuaishou retained control of the business.