Sand.ai closes $200M round at over $1B valuation

Sand.ai, the Beijing video-generation startup, said on November 5, 2026 that it closed a $200 million Series A+ round, a raise the company says values it above $1 billion and brings its fundraising over the past ten months to $300 million. Chinese investment firm CoStone Capital and Shenzhen-listed Wangsu Science & Technology jointly led, DealStreetAsia reported.

The valuation and the ten-month total are company-supplied. TechNode reports both as Sand.ai's own figures rather than audited numbers.

The round completes the raise Wangsu first disclosed in September, and DealStreetAsia reports it as the third round Sand.ai has closed in 2026. The new element is the closing itself. Wangsu's September disclosure covered only its own tranche; the wider round has now closed, drawing, in the company's description, industrial capital, government funds and both yuan and dollar investors.

The September step is the subject of SLOP TV's September 30 report, which put the round's post-money valuation near $1.01 billion from the arithmetic in Wangsu's exchange filing. The company's own number, now that the round has closed, is a valuation above $1 billion.

Wangsu said in a September 29 filing that it planned to invest RMB300 million, about $44.5 million, through a convertible note and warrants for Series A+ preferred shares, for about 4.4 percent of Sand.ai once other investors subscribed. An October 19 progress filing said the parties signed the convertible-note and preferred-share agreements on October 16, TechNode reported. Wangsu said the two companies intend to cooperate on audio and video inference, low-latency edge inference and enterprise deployment.

Among the participants, per DealStreetAsia, were Shanghai state-backed investors Pudong Venture Capital Group and an investment arm of Shanghai International Group, and returning shareholders iMPC, formerly Matrix Partners China, CAS Star and HyT Capital.

Sand.ai was founded in early 2024 by Cao Yue, a former principal researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and a co-author of the Swin Transformer. Its models are the MAGI family. MAGI-2 Preview, which the company describes as a roughly 114-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that generates audio and video together, was released as an open-source project. Sand.ai says it will release the full MAGI-2 in the near term. Its creator app, VidMuse, reached more than $10 million in annualized recurring revenue within two months of launch, according to the company, a figure that has not been independently audited.

Sand.ai said the proceeds will fund video foundation-model research, training and inference infrastructure, product development and international expansion.

The closing lands in a market where scale separates the leaders. Kuaishou's video-generation unit Beijing Kling completed an approximately RMB19.80 billion ($2.91 billion) financing, per a Kuaishou filing dated October 30 that TechNode reported, and the July transaction filing put Beijing Kling's pre-transaction valuation at $15 billion. Sand.ai's $200 million is about 7 percent of Kling's $2.91 billion.

For creators, the effect is indirect. More capital aimed at video foundation models and inference infrastructure could hold down generation costs, if the spending reaches pricing. VidMuse is the closest thing to a consumer product the round funds, and Sand.ai has not said whether the full MAGI-2 will change what it charges.

The full release of MAGI-2 is the next milestone Sand.ai has named, and the company says it will come in the near term.