Sand.ai raises $200M Series A+, becomes unicorn, preps full release of 114B-param MAGI-2 video model
智东西 · wechat · 2026-11-05
Beijing-based video generation startup Sand.ai announced a $200M Series A+ round on Nov 5, co-led by Shiji Capital and Wangsu Science & Technology, pushing its 2026 fundraising to $300M in 10 months and unicorn status (valuation undisclosed).
Background
- Founder/CEO Cao Yue: Tsinghua PhD, ex-MSRA researcher, ex-head of BAAI's visual model center, co-founder of Light Years Beyond; co-authored Swin Transformer (ICCV 2021 Marr Prize)
Technical progress
- Apr 2025: open-sourced autoregressive video model MAGI-1
- Mar 2026: open-sourced MagiHuman, a unified single-stream Transformer for text/video/audio
- Aug 2026: open-sourced MAGI-2 Preview — the first video generation model scaled to 100B+ params with open weights (114B total, 6B active, fine-grained MoE); ranked #6 on Artificial Analysis image-to-video leaderboard at launch
- A larger MAGI-2 full release is coming soon
Business
- VidMuse product surpassed $10M ARR within two months of launch
- Funds will go to model R&D, training/inference infrastructure, and global expansion
Related event: Sand.ai raises $200M Series A+ to become a unicorn(3 posts)→
More from Venture
- Nvidia Earnings Nov 17, Anthropic IPO Nov 18, GTA 6 Nov 19: A Make-or-Break Week — noahsolomon · 2026-11-13
- Indie SEO Tactic: Target Competitor 'Worth It / vs' Question Keywords to Capture Buyers — daluoseo · 2026-11-13
- Indie founder hits $1.22M ARR, up 3,642% in six months — ycombinator · 2026-11-13
- Stripe's business in one building diagram: $1.9T payments, 9 acquisitions — FinanceYF5 · 2026-11-13
- $100-$200/mo frontier AI subscription tiers: "this shapes the future economy" — vedantmisra · 2026-11-13
- 83-Year-Old Indian IT Veteran Soota Bets ₹5,000cr on AI Digital Health — santoshpanda · 2026-11-13