Beijing-based video-generation startup Sand.ai has closed a $200 million Series A+ round, becoming the latest Chinese AI company to cross the $1 billion valuation mark. The company announced the closing on 5 November, saying the round was jointly led by CoStone Capital and Wangsu Science & Technology, a Shenzhen-listed IT infrastructure firm. TechNode reported the deal on 6 November.

The round is Sand.ai's third fundraising of 2026 and takes the total it has raised over the past ten months to $300 million, according to the company. Both the valuation and the cumulative figure are company-supplied and have not been independently verified. Wangsu had already disclosed its part: a September filing with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange said it planned to invest about RMB300 million, roughly $44.5 million, through a convertible note and warrants, for about 4.4 per cent of the company.

Founded in January 2024 by Cao Yue, a former principal researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, Sand.ai builds the MAGI family of video-generation models. Its MAGI-2 Preview, released in open-source form in August, is a 114-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that generates audio and video together. The company says the full version of MAGI-2 will follow shortly, and the new money will fund model research, training and inference infrastructure, product work and expansion overseas.

Sand.ai also sells VidMuse, a paid service for making music videos, adverts and animated content, which it says passed $10 million in annualised recurring revenue within two months of its January launch, a figure that has not been independently audited. The round lands in a crowded market: Kuaishou's Kling AI unit completed a financing of about RMB19.8 billion in October, underlining how expensive the race to build video models has become.