A Video Model Startup Raised $200 Million and Still Loses Money
Third round in ten months takes Sand.ai to $300 million raised, on first-half revenue of RMB 17.4 million against a RMB 152 million loss.
Sand.ai, the Shanghai-based video foundation model company founded in 2024 by former MSRA researcher Cao Yue, announced on 5 November 2026 a $200 million A+ round co-led by Basis Capital and Wangsu Technology, its third raise this year and about $300 million in ten months. Wangsu’s disclosure showed first-half 2026 revenue of RMB 17.4 million against a net loss of roughly RMB 152 million. Its MAGI-2 Preview uses an MoE architecture totalling about 114 billion parameters with roughly 6 billion active per forward pass, and a distilled 10-second 1080p inference cost near RMB 0.5. The commercial read is that a 10-fold cost advantage is being funded as infrastructure, but the revenue line has not yet caught up with the valuation.
