Chinese video-generation startup Sand.ai closes $200 M Series A+ funding for video AI
Chinese video-generation startup Sand.ai has closed a $200 million Series A+ funding round, marking another major investment in China’s increasingly competitive generative video industry.
The Beijing-based company announced the completion of the round on November 5. CoStone Capital and Shenzhen-listed Wangsu Science & Technology jointly led the investment, which also saw participation from Chinese venture capital firms, state-backed investors and existing shareholders.
Sand.ai said the latest round takes its total fundraising over the past 10 months to $300 million and values the company at more than $1 billion. These valuation and cumulative funding figures were provided by the company.
The proceeds will be used to advance research into video foundation models, strengthen training and inference infrastructure, develop products and support international expansion. The company also plans to launch the full version of its MAGI-2 model in the near future.
Wangsu’s investment disclosed through exchange filings
Wangsu’s participation in the funding round was announced before the overall transaction was completed. In a September 29 filing with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the company said it intended to invest RMB300 million, or approximately $44.5 million, in Sand.ai through a convertible note and warrants for Series A+ preferred shares.
Wangsu stated that the investment would give it an approximately 4.4% stake in Sand.ai after the remaining investors completed their subscriptions. An October 19 progress update filed with the exchange confirmed that the two companies had signed the convertible-note and preferred-share agreements on October 16.
The exchange filings identify Sand.ai as a company developing video-generation models and applications. Wangsu said the partnership would involve collaboration in audio and video inference, low-latency edge inference and enterprise deployment. It also stated that Sand.ai’s new models and related technologies would receive priority deployment through Wangsu’s infrastructure, subject to the agreements between the companies.
Video models and creator-focused products
Founded in 2024, Sand.ai is led by Cao Yue, a former principal researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and co-author of the Swin Transformer computer-vision architecture.
The startup develops its MAGI series of video models and VidMuse, a paid content creation platform for music videos, advertisements and animated content. According to its official website, MAGI-2 Preview is a 114-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model capable of generating audio and video jointly.
Sand.ai claims that VidMuse surpassed $10 million in annualised recurring revenue within two months of its launch. However, the figure has not been independently audited.
The funding comes amid another major transaction in China’s generative video sector. Kuaishou’s Kling AI unit completed a financing round worth approximately RMB19.8 billion in October, while Kuaishou retained control of the business.
