Sand.ai raises $200M Series A extension, joins unicorn ranks
What's the deal? Chinese video-generation startup Sand.ai has raised $200 million in a Series A extension, pushing it into unicorn territory. Cornerstone Capital and Wangsu Science & TechnologyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → co-led the round, with Matrix Partners China, Panlin Capital, Orient Securities Capital, Tianchuang Capital, and state-backed funds including Shandong Railway InvestmentDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Pudong Venture CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Shanghai Guofang participating. Existing backers Jeneration CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Huaye Tiancheng, and CAS Star also returned.
Why now? The deal is Sand.ai's third raise of 2026, bringing its 10-month total to $300 million. It lands just ahead of the full release of MAGI-2, the company's new mixture-of-experts video-generation model.
What's the endgame? Sand.ai, founded in January 2024 by former Microsoft Research Asia researcher Yue Cao, builds foundation models for video. It will spend the money on model research, training and inference infrastructure, product iteration, and overseas expansion. The company open-sourced its MoE model MAGI-2 Preview — a roughly 114-billion-parameter system it bills as the first open-source MoE video model at that scale — betting an open strategy will widen its market reach.
What could go wrong? Foundation models demand constant spending, and early technical leads can erode quickly as rivals iterate. Sand.ai remains far smaller than scaled competitors: Kuaishou's Kling unit closed a roughly $2.9 billion raise in October at a reported valuation near $18 billion, and reported over US$116.9M in second-quarter revenue, up more than 200% year on year.
The signal: Investors are still willing to price independent model developers separately from the platforms. Backers are betting that video generation becomes a core content-production service supplied by a handful of firms with sustained research capacity — and that Sand.ai's model work converts into durable adoption and revenue.
Read more: sohu.com
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
