Sand.ai Closes $200 Million Series A+ Funding Round to Join Unicorn Club

On November 5, Sand.ai—a video-focused foundation model company—announced it has closed a $200 million Series A+ funding round. The round was co-led by Primavera Capital Group and Westone Technologies, with participation from Shanghai State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, Times Capital, and existing investors including Matrix Partners China, which further increased its stake. This marks Sand.ai’s third funding round within 2026—just 10 months after its initial financing—and brings its total raised capital to $300 million. Following this round, the company officially joins the unicorn club. Founded by Cao Yue, former Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, Sand.ai develops the MAGI series of foundational video generation models. In August 2026, the company open-sourced MAGI-2 Preview, a trillion-parameter video generation model built on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, featuring a total parameter count of 114 billion and approximately 6 billion parameters activated per inference. According to official disclosures, an even larger-scale version—MA