Sand.ai, a company focusing on video generation models and products founded in January 2024 by Cao Yue, has just completed two rounds of financing totaling over $100 million. Investors include Look Capital, Lollapalooza Capital, Jiukun Venture Capital, Matrix Partners China, MSA Capital, Sinovation Ventures, Xianghe Capital, Source Code Capital, Zhongke Chuangxing, Hongtai Fund, Capital Today, Huaye Tiancheng, Yunhui Capital, IDG, Baidu Ventures and other first-tier institutions, with Xinghan Capital as financial advisor. Cao Yue, whose previous startup "Light Years Beyond" ended, chose the autoregressive route for video generation when the mainstream narrative was the Diffusion route. In early 2025, after releasing the Magi-1 model trained on autoregressive architecture, the team explored synchronous audio-video generation, becoming one of the earliest teams to produce such a model, second only to Google VEO 3. Magi-1 maintained the top position on Google DeepMind's Physics IQ benchmark. In November 2025, Cao Yue decided to shift the model architecture from Dense to MoE, citing an "impossible trinity for video models: cost, speed, and effectiveness" and that "MoE is the answer." In Q3 2026, Sand.ai will release a new-generation video generation model adopting the MoE architecture, combining efficient inference with the largest parameter scale in the current open-source