Sand.ai Raises $200 Million Series A+, Crossing $1 Billion Valuation

Chinese video-generation startup Sand.ai has closed a $200 million Series A+ round, pushing its valuation above $1 billion just weeks after Kling AI, its far larger rival, pulled in roughly $2.9 billion. The Beijing-based company announced the close on November 5, per TechNode Global.

The round was jointly led by CoStone Capital and Shenzhen-listed Wangsu Science & Technology, with participation from Chinese venture firms, state-backed investors and existing shareholders. Sand.ai said the deal brings its total fundraising over the past 10 months to $300 million. Both the valuation and the cumulative figure are company-supplied.

What does the money actually fund?

Sand.ai plans to deploy proceeds across video foundation-model research, training and inference infrastructure, product development and international expansion. It also intends to release the full version of its MAGI-2 model in the near term — the next concrete milestone investors will be watching.

Wangsu's stake is already on the record

Wangsu's involvement didn't wait for the round to close. In a September 29 filing with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the company said it planned to invest RMB300 million — about $44.5 million — in Sand.ai via a convertible note and warrants for Series A+ preferred shares. Wangsu said the structure would leave it holding roughly 4.4 percent of Sand.ai once other investors completed their subscriptions.

An October 19 progress filing confirmed the parties signed the convertible-note and preferred-share agreements on October 16. The disclosures describe Sand.ai as a developer of video-generation models and applications, and lay out a commercial logic beyond the equity: the two companies intend to collaborate on audio and video inference, low-latency edge inference and enterprise deployment. Sand.ai's new models will also get priority deployment through Wangsu's infrastructure, subject to the parties' agreements.

For practitioners, that last clause matters most. A listed edge-computing operator committing to prioritize distribution gives Sand.ai a deployment channel most model startups have to buy or build.

Who's behind the model?

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 technical pedigree lines up with the product claims.

The company develops the MAGI family of video models and VidMuse, a paid creation service for music videos, advertisements and animated content. Its website says MAGI-2 Preview is a 114-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that generates audio and video jointly. Sand.ai claims VidMuse passed $10 million in annualized recurring revenue within two months of launch — about $5 million per month in run-rate terms, a pace few creator tools reach that quickly. That figure has not been independently audited.

A sector consolidating fast

The financing lands amid a surge of capital into 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. Kling's roughly $2.9 billion raise dwarfs Sand.ai's round, but the two deals within a month signal that investors are now underwriting video generation at scale rather than seeding experiments.

Sand.ai's next test is execution: shipping the full MAGI-2, converting VidMuse's unaudited run-rate into durable revenue, and proving the Wangsu partnership can move inference costs and reach.