Sand.ai raises $200M Series A+ to hit $1B valuation

Sand.ai was founded in early 2024 by Cao Yue, a Tsinghua PhD graduate. Before that, Cao co-founded AI company Light Year with Wang Huiwen in February 2023; Meituan acquired Light Year four months later for $281 million.

The startup builds generative video models it says lower costs and speed up turnaround for high-quality video creation. Its lineup includes Magi-1, an autoregressive video generation model, and GAGA-1, a model for simultaneous audio-visual generation. Sand.ai also released MAGI-2 Preview as open-source research, and says the official version of MAGI-2 is coming soon.

On the application side, its paid AI video service VidMuse offers tools for music videos, product ads and anime dramas. It reached more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue within two months of launching in January.

Sand.ai is one of several Chinese AI video players racing to turn research models into paid products, and its $300 million in 10 months shows investors are still writing large checks for video generation even as funding elsewhere cools. For anyone watching the vertical, expect the new money to go into model training, inference infrastructure, product updates and global expansion.

There is no announced plan to bring VidMuse or MAGI-2 to Tunisia, and pricing for the region has not been disclosed, so local availability remains unclear. Creators and small studios here already use AI video tools for ads and social clips; VidMuse is a paid service, and open-source releases like MAGI-2 Preview are the most realistic way to test the technology today.