Shanghai AI Video Startup Sand.ai Completes $200M A+ Round, Raising $300M in 10 Months
Sand.ai secured a $200M round led by Cornerstone Capital and Wangsu Science & Technology, claiming unicorn status to fund its 100-billion-parameter video model.
Zhidx reported on November 5 that Shanghai-based video generation foundation model startup Sand.ai has completed a $200 million (approx. 1.334 billion yuan) A+ funding round. This is the company's third financing event in 2026, bringing its cumulative fundraising to $300 million (approx. 2.001 billion yuan) over 10 months. While Sand.ai did not disclose its post-money valuation, the company stated it has officially joined the ranks of unicorns following this round.
The round was co-led by Cornerstone Capital and Wangsu Science & Technology. Other participants include Era Capital, Panlin Capital, Dongzheng Capital, Tianchuang Capital (along with Shandong Railway Industrial Investment and Shandong Railway Fund), as well as Shanghai state-backed entities like Pudong Venture Capital and Shanghai Guofang. Existing investors such as Matrix China, Huaye Tiancheng, and CAS Star continued to add capital. Sand.ai noted that the funds will primarily be used for video foundation model R&D, training and inference infrastructure, product iteration, and global market expansion.
Founded in January 2024 and headquartered in Shanghai, Sand.ai focuses on video generation foundation models and application products. Its founder and CEO, Cao Yue, holds a Ph.D. in Software Engineering from Tsinghua University and previously served as a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and head of the Visual Model Research Center at Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI). He was also a co-founder of Light Year, an AI large model company acquired by Meituan. Cao contributed to visual model research including Swin Transformer, which won the ICCV 2021 Marr Prize.
Technically, Sand.ai has evolved its architecture from autoregressive generation and joint audio-video modeling to hundred-billion-parameter MoE models. In August 2026, the company released and open-sourced MAGI-2 Preview, becoming the first team globally to scale a video generation model to 100 billion parameters while releasing model weights. The model uses an ultra-fine-grained MoE architecture with approximately 114B total parameters, activating only about 6B per forward pass. Additionally, Sand.ai's video generation product VidMuse surpassed $10 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) two months after launch.