Sand.ai raises $200M Series A+ to join unicorn ranks amid crowded video model race
快鲤鱼 · wechat · 2026-11-05
Sand.ai announced a $200M Series A+ led by Jishi Capital and Wangsu Technology, its third round in 10 months totaling $300M, officially reaching unicorn status. Backers include Wang Huiwen and Kuaishou founder Su Hua.
Founder Cao Yue: Tsinghua PhD, ex-MSRA researcher, co-author of Swin Transformer (ICCV 2021 best paper), later algorithm co-founder of Light Years Beyond.
Tech: Unlike the diffusion architectures of Kling/Seedance, Sand.ai bets on autoregressive world models — MAGI-1 generates video chunk-by-chunk; MAGI-2 Preview shifts to a single-stream MoE architecture with 114B total parameters (6B active per token) and joint audio-video modeling.
Business: open-sourced components (MagiAttention), API service, and VidMuse app (music-driven video creation) which hit $10M ARR within two months.
The field: HiDream raised 2.1B+ RMB serving 50M pro users; Shengshu at 6B RMB raised / $2B+ valuation / $20M ARR; PixVerse at 150M+ users. Entry price for independent video model companies is now hundreds of millions of dollars.
Related event: Sand.ai raises $200M Series A+ to become a unicorn(3 posts)→
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