Sand.ai raises $200M Series A+ after ~$300M in 10 months, betting on autoregressive video world models
创业邦 · wechat · 2026-11-06
Video-model startup Sand.ai announced a $200M Series A+ led by Cornerstone Capital and Wangsu Science & Tech, with Shanghai state-backed funds joining and early backers including Wang Huiwen and Su Hua reinvesting — making it a unicorn after $300M raised across three rounds in ten months.
Founder Cao Yue (Tsinghua/MSRA, co-author of Swin Transformer, ICCV 2021 best paper; ex-Light Years Beyond co-founder) bets on an autoregressive "video world model" approach rather than the Diffusion architectures behind Kling and Seedance. MAGI-1 launched May 2025; MAGI-2 Preview (Aug 2026) moved to a single-stream, 114B-parameter MoE with joint audio-video modeling. Business model spans open models, APIs, and its own app VidMuse, which hit $10M ARR within two months of launch.
The piece maps the crowded field: HiDream (2.1B+ RMB raised, 50M pro users), Shengshu (6B RMB, $20M+ ARR), PixVerse (150M+ users). Entry tickets for independent video-model companies now run into hundreds of millions of dollars — Sand.ai must convert its technical window into recurring revenue before it closes.
Related event: Sand.ai raises $200M Series A+ to become a unicorn(3 posts)→
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