Beijing-based video-generation startup Sand.ai announced a $200 million Series A+ round on 5 November, taking its valuation above $1 billion and its fundraising to $300 million in 10 months, DealStreetAsia reported.
Key points
- The Series A+ financing was Sand.ai’s third round in 2026.
- Reports give different names for one joint lead investor: CoStone Capital and Cornerstone Capital.
- DealStreetAsia reported that VidMuse reached more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue within two months of its January launch.
- The company plans to put the proceeds towards video models, infrastructure, products and expansion.
CoStone Capital and Wangsu lead the round
CoStone Capital, a Chinese investment firm, and Shenzhen-listed IT infrastructure company Wangsu Science & Technology jointly led the round, DealStreetAsia reported. TechNode named Cornerstone Capital and Wangsu Science & Technology as the joint leads.
The investor group included private investment firms, state-owned Pudong Venture Capital Group and an investment arm of Shanghai International Group. Existing backers iMPC, formerly Matrix Partners China, CAS Star and HyT Capital also invested in the Series A+ round, according to the company announcement reported by DealStreetAsia.
Sand.ai had raised over $100 million in two earlier rounds less than five months before this financing. Those investors included Lollapalooza Capital, the family office of Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen, alongside IDG Capital, Baidu Ventures and Sinovation Ventures. The three rounds together brought the company’s fundraising over the past 10 months to $300 million.
The round brings industry capital and state-owned investors into the same financing as Sand.ai’s existing venture backers. Sand.ai plans to spend the proceeds on video-model research and training, infrastructure for running models, product development and expansion into international markets. Those plans place both model development and the computing capacity to serve it within the company’s stated uses for the new money.
DealStreetAsia reports VidMuse annual recurring revenue above $10 million
VidMuse, Sand.ai’s paid video-creation service, reached annual recurring revenue of more than $10 million within two months of its January launch, DealStreetAsia reported. Annual recurring revenue expresses the current rate of subscription income over a year. The reported figure therefore describes a revenue run rate reached soon after launch, rather than revenue collected across a full year.
VidMuse offers tools for making music videos, product advertisements and anime dramas. It gives Sand.ai a paid application alongside its work on video-generation models. The planned uses of the funding include product development, video-model research and training, and inference infrastructure.
Cao Yue, a Tsinghua University PhD graduate, founded Sand.ai in early 2024. Cao had previously co-founded AI company Light Year with Wang Huiwen in February 2023. Meituan acquired Light Year for $281 million in June 2023, four months after its founding.
MAGI-2 follows Sand.ai’s research release
Sand.ai plans to release the full version of MAGI-2, a larger video-generation model using a mixture-of-experts architecture, TechNode reported. That architecture routes work to selected parts of a model rather than using every part for each task. Sand.ai also plans to use the new funding for model training and inference infrastructure.
The company has already released MAGI-2 Preview for open-source research. Its other models include Magi-1, which generates video sequentially, and GAGA-1, designed to generate audio and video together. The planned full MAGI-2 release would add to a product line that spans video generation, combined audio-video generation and VidMuse’s paid creation tools.
