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Sand.ai raises a $200M Series A+ at a $1B valuation, with the full MAGI-2 still unreleased

The round closed on November 5 and takes the Beijing video-model company to $300 million in ten months, but the only public model is still the August research preview.

By Daniel Ochoa · 9 November 2026

Sand.ai closed a $200 million Series A+ on November 5 and crossed a $1 billion valuation, but the specifics of the round live in press reports and a Shenzhen Stock Exchange filing rather than in a funding announcement from the company, and the model the money is meant to finish, the full version of MAGI-2, has no announced release date. What exists publicly is still the August research preview.

Two lead investors, one of them named two different ways

The round was co-led by Wangsu Science & Technology and a firm that reports render inconsistently in English, as Cornerstone Capital in TechNode's write-up and as CoStone Capital in the DealStreetAsia-sourced versions. State-linked money is a large part of the cap table: Pudong Venture Capital Group, an investment arm of Shanghai International Group, took part alongside Times Capital, Panlin Capital and existing shareholders. Sand.ai says the round brings its fundraising over the past ten months to $300 million across three rounds, making this its third raise of 2026.

A 4.4% stake prices the company at roughly $1 billion

The one figure with a paper trail behind it comes from Wangsu. In a September 29 filing with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the listed company said it planned to put RMB 300 million, about $44.5 million, into Sand.ai through a convertible note and warrants for Series A+ preferred shares, and that the arrangement would leave it with about 4.4% of Sand.ai once the other investors completed their subscriptions. That ratio implies a valuation close to $1.0 billion, which is consistent with the "above $1 billion" figure Sand.ai gave, and it is the only piece of the valuation claim that can be checked against a regulatory document rather than a press statement.

MAGI-2 Preview is the only model anyone outside the company has run

Sand.ai was founded in 2024 by Cao Yue, a former principal researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and a co-author of the Swin Transformer architecture. Its public model is MAGI-2 Preview, released on August 5 under Apache 2.0: a mixture-of-experts video model with 114 billion total parameters that activates roughly 6 billion per token and generates audio and video jointly in a single pass.

Two claims from that launch are worth holding onto as the company scales up. Sand.ai said generation costs about one tenth of what mainstream closed models charge, and it placed MAGI-2 Preview sixth on an Artificial Analysis video leaderboard, though write-ups disagree on whether that rank was on the general video board or the image-to-video board. Neither number has a third-party cost measurement attached to it.

The comparison that matters is the live price of the incumbents it names as targets. In our radar, a five-second 720p clip from Seedance 2.5 is priced across thirteen platforms, and Kling 4.0 sits in the same tier. A tenth of that is a specific, testable claim once a hosted MAGI-2 exists.

What the round does not disclose

Sand.ai says the proceeds go to video foundation-model research, training and inference infrastructure, product development and international expansion, and that the full MAGI-2 will follow "in the near term." No date, no parameter count and no pricing for that model have been published. On the revenue side, DealStreetAsia reports that VidMuse, Sand.ai's paid creation service, passed $10 million in annual recurring revenue within two months of its January launch, a figure the company has not itself published alongside a definition of how it is measured.

Sources: TechNode, TechNode Global, Sand.ai.

Daniel Ochoa: Covers model launches, shutdowns and pricing changes as they happen. Reads deprecation notices for a living so you do not have to.