Ant Group's three independent business segments have successively initiated external financing, which the company internally views as a phase test to verify each entity's independent operations and cash-generating capabilities.

The market generally perceives this funding as a step toward paving the way for an initial public offering. However, all three entities must continue to prove their ability to generate independent revenue before they can access the capital markets.

Six years after its initial IPO attempt was halted, Ant Group Co., Ltd. is once again testing the capital markets. In less than two weeks, from July 21 to August 3, 2026, four of its subsidiaries announced external financing news. On July 21, Ant International, the primary vehicle for Ant Group's global business, announced the completion of its Series A funding round, raising approximately $1.2 billion from investors including Ant Group, existing shareholders like Alibaba, and several prominent international investment institutions. Subsequently, on July 29, both OceanBase and Ant Digital Technologies were reported to be seeking external funding. According to multiple media reports, OceanBase is pursuing a Series A round, aiming to raise between 2 billion and 3 billion yuan, and has already engaged with several leading investment institutions. Meanwhile, Ant Digital Technologies is preparing for a pre-IPO round. Ant Group Co., Ltd. has confirmed that both companies are indeed seeking external financing, with OceanBase's progress being slightly ahead of Ant Digital Technologies. In early August, Ant Lingbo Technology, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ant Group, also confirmed to the media that it has initiated its first funding round, aiming to raise 1.5 billion yuan, with plans to complete two rounds within the year.

This series of capital maneuvers has sparked significant market interest: Is Ant Group driving its business segments towards separate listings? Looking back to March 2024, Ant Group announced an organizational structure upgrade, establishing independent boards for Ant International, OceanBase, and Ant Digital Technologies, marking their independent operations. At that time, the market already anticipated that these three companies would eventually list independently, and the recent actions have accelerated those expectations. In response, sources close to the company revealed that internally, Ant Group views this round of financing more as a periodic test of the independent operations of these three entities, specifically assessing whether their business models and independent cash-generation capabilities have gained market recognition. Discussing a listing is still premature, and none of the three companies are currently in the IPO preparation stage.

Multiple sources indicate that the market's expectations are not unfounded. Ant International, the main carrier of Ant Group's globalization strategy, has completed its external financing. According to several media reports, Ant International's 2025 revenue was approximately $3.75 billion, and it is expected to list in Hong Kong within the year. OceanBase is Ant Group's database brand. An insider revealed that OceanBase's annualized revenue in 2026 has exceeded 1.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of approximately 70%. As early as 2024, OceanBase CEO Yang Bing stated in an interview that he hoped the company could go public within three to four years. Ant Group Co., Ltd. has learned exclusively that Ant Digital Technologies' revenue in 2025 was around 5 billion yuan, with a target of about 8 billion yuan for 2026. A source close to Ant Digital Technologies said the company originally planned to pursue an IPO when its revenue reached the 10 billion yuan scale, projecting this could happen around 2027 based on its revenue growth rate. Ant Group was contacted for comments on this information but did not respond by the time of publication.

The market's enthusiasm also stems from an unfulfilled wealth event. In October 2020, Ant Group's IPO was halted just before its listing, with its overall valuation plummeting from a pre-listing peak of 2.1 trillion yuan to 567.1 billion yuan in 2023, a decline of over 70%. Reflecting on the past six years, the market has undergone significant changes. As of August 13, 2026, the market capitalization of domestic memory chip giant Changxin Technology reached 3.54 trillion yuan, surpassing Tencent to become the most valuable listed company in China. The "15th Five-Year Plan" outline, officially released earlier this year, emphasizes focusing on strategically critical areas and weak links in the industrial supply chain, taking extraordinary measures to achieve decisive breakthroughs in core technologies across entire chains in fields like integrated circuits, industrial machine tools, high-end instruments, basic software, advanced materials, and biotechnology. It also aims to systematically plan around the world's technological frontiers, implementing strategic deployments in AI, quantum technology, biotechnology, and new energy, accelerating breakthroughs in fundamental theories and underlying technologies, and promoting their application. Several investment institution sources noted that under the guidance of top-level design, hard technology and AI have dominated market narratives, leaving limited room for fintech companies.

Since 2023, Ant Group has also proposed an "AI First" strategy, making AI a core investment direction for the next decade. From 2023 to 2025, Ant Group's total technology investment accumulated nearly 80 billion yuan. "Ant Group is back in the game," declared Ant Group CEO Han Xinyi in an exclusive interview at the beginning of 2026. The current focus is on whether Ant International, OceanBase, and Ant Digital Technologies can propel Ant Group back to its former peak. Among the three companies spun off in 2024, Ant International is considered the closest to a listing. Headquartered in Singapore, it is the primary vehicle for Ant Group's global business. Ant International stated that the financing funds will be used to expand its global operations, including accelerating AI technology investment. Citing insider sources, media reported that Ant International's Series A valuation target is no less than $10 billion, and this fundraising could help the company initiate a Hong Kong listing as early as this year. Earlier, in May 2025, Caixin reported that Ant International planned to list in Hong Kong, noting that there were no policy obstacles at that time. Multiple sources close to Ant Group said that market expectations for Ant International's listing are already established. One internal source mentioned that the possibility of Ant International going public is "very high." Miao Tianyi, Managing Partner of Puzhuo Capital, analyzed that since Ant International's main business is in Singapore and targets global investors, if its equity structure is further optimized after this round, the Hong Kong stock market, which has a certain acceptance of high-quality global tech companies, would offer a relatively good listing window.

As the second independent segment to face capital market scrutiny, OceanBase was originally a database product under Ant Group's digital technology division. It was incorporated as a company in 2020 and began independent commercial operations. To date, OceanBase has become a leading domestic distributed database. On the day the external financing reports were published, OceanBase quickly responded, stating that it is fully committed to data technology and product innovation in the AI era and will continue to maintain open communication with the capital market. An insider said this financing will help OceanBase further strengthen its independent operations and support its expansion into the AI data platform domain. OceanBase has long planned for an IPO. During a media briefing in October 2024, CEO Yang Bing stated that his KPI was for the company to go public within the next three to four years. "OceanBase operates in the domestic database track, and the localization of hard technology is a current mainstream theme in the capital market. Domestic investors have a high recognition of the basic software sector, and the A-share STAR Market provides a relatively friendly environment," said Miao Tianyi.

Currently, Ant Digital Technologies has not officially responded to the financing rumors. The company's external financing is being prepared, with progress slightly slower than OceanBase. Ant Digital Technologies is an independent segment for commercializing Ant Group's technology, with businesses primarily including financial large models and intelligent agents, financial risk control, blockchain, and privacy computing. During a media briefing in September 2024, Ant Digital Technologies was repeatedly asked about its listing plans. CEO Zhao Wenbiao responded that there is no timetable yet, but "as the entire business moves upward, this time may not be too far off." Several sources familiar with the matter previously stated that Ant Digital Technologies does indeed have listing plans. One source close to the company said it originally planned to pursue an IPO when revenue reached 10 billion yuan, projecting this could happen around 2027. Although no clear timetable has been announced, the listing of the three independent segments is considered highly probable. "Investment institutions all have exit needs; dividends only bring in so much money," one institutional investor said bluntly, adding that after initiating external financing, a listing is only a matter of time. In this context, the external financing rounds by these three companies are widely seen as paving the way for their subsequent IPOs. The next question is how to value Ant International, OceanBase, and Ant Digital Technologies. An investor focused on the tech sector noted that this largely depends on the sector. "A fintech company's valuation is around 30 times P/E, while an AI company's valuation is over 80 times." Ant International positions itself as a cross-border digital payment and financial services platform, holding over 70 payment licenses and at least two banking licenses globally. Investors see it as belonging to the same fintech track as Ant Group. OceanBase and Ant Digital Technologies do not hold financial licenses and primarily provide technology services to enterprises. In 2025, both companies increased their investments in AI. For example, a source close to Ant Group said Ant Digital Technologies positions itself as an enterprise-level AI service provider, with a global benchmark being Palantir, a US-based big data analytics and enterprise AI software platform with a market cap exceeding $410 billion. To some extent, OceanBase and Ant Digital Technologies are also fulfilling the 2017 declaration by Ant Financial (renamed Ant Group in 2020) that it would "only do tech, supporting financial institutions to do fin." At that time, Ant Financial CEO Eric Jing stated in an interview that the purpose of obtaining financial licenses was to provide a testing ground for "techfin," using the technology honed in that testing ground to serve more ecosystem participants. However, the reality is that both companies originated from Ant Group's financial scenarios, with a significant portion of their revenue coming from financial industry clients. OceanBase's previously disclosed data showed that over 60% of its 2021 revenue came from financial clients, which dropped to about 50% in 2022. Since then, OceanBase has not disclosed its revenue composition. In November 2025, with its global client count surpassing 4,000, Yang Bing predicted that the proportion of non-financial clients would increase significantly in 2026, approaching a 50-50 split. Ant Digital Technologies is in a similar situation. In September 2025, Zhao Wenbiao admitted that finance is Ant Digital Technologies' strength, with many AI application scenarios, and the financial industry is also the sector with the highest digital investment. In 2025, Ant Digital Technologies achieved 100% growth in both the financial and new energy sectors. Zhao also noted that Ant Digital Technologies has been in the fintech track for over a decade, distinguishing itself from other fintech companies by having divested its financial business. Notably, several interviewees emphasized that before knocking on the doors of the capital market, the three independent segments of Ant Group must prove their ability to generate commercial revenue independently. "Independence is a fundamental threshold for an IPO under the registration system. If an enterprise is highly dependent on its parent company, has a persistently high proportion of related-party transactions, and cannot demonstrate market-oriented customer acquisition capabilities, even if its financial data is impressive, it will constitute a material obstacle. This would lead to inquiries during the review process, delaying the audit, and in severe cases, render the company ineligible for issuance," said Miao Tianyi. For the companies spun off from Ant, independence is a core focus of review, and regulators will be particularly vigilant about situations where the business is essentially still attached to the group.

Nearly two and a half years after spinning off from the group, how are the businesses of Ant Group's three companies shaping up? In terms of revenue scale and financing pace, Ant International is moving faster. Media reports citing insider sources indicate that Ant International's revenue was $3 billion in 2024 and grew by 25% year-on-year in 2025 (approximately $3.75 billion). Since becoming independent in 2024, Ant International has built four main business segments: Alipay+, Antom, WorldFirst, and Bettr, corresponding to consumer payments, merchant acquiring, cross-border receipts and payments, and inclusive credit services. Among these, Alipay+ is building an ecosystem network connecting global consumers, merchants, and SMEs by integrating global wallets. According to Ant Group's official data, Alipay+ has connected over 50 wallets globally, including standard QR code payment systems in more than 10 countries, covering over 150 million merchants and more than 2 billion user accounts. "A global ecosystem network encompassing wallet payments, merchant acquiring, and cross-border remittances is the segment with the most imaginative potential for Ant International," said Wang Pengbo, Chief Analyst at Botong Consulting. "In the long term, it has the opportunity to grow into an international payment giant valued at hundreds of billions of dollars." However, Wang also acknowledged that Ant International's core businesses, such as overseas acquiring and cross-border payments, are facing increasingly intense industry competition, creating uncertainty in overall profitability. On one hand, the cross-border payment track is becoming crowded, intensifying internal competition. On the other hand, according to Botong Analysis research, the average transaction fee rate for cross-border payment institutions has been significantly compressed from the previous 1%-2% to 0.4%, continuously squeezing the profit margin from basic fees and making it more difficult for enterprises to be profitable. Extensive research indicates that both domestic and international payment institutions have been competing for Chinese companies going overseas. In this fierce competition, WorldFirst attracts customers through preferential rates, or even "zero-rate" policies, covering costs through high-margin value-added services like currency conversion. Earlier this year, one cross-border e-commerce seller noted that compared to traditional cross-border payment institutions, WorldFirst offers more competitive rates, "essentially free for large volumes," thus winning over many customers. This model of using payments as a traffic gateway and profiting through value-added services like finance also evokes memories of Alipay in its early days. Some industry insiders believe that Ant International is, to some extent, replicating Alipay overseas. Wang Pengbo commented that Ant International's ecosystem is more similar to the bank card networks of international card organizations like Visa and Mastercard. The difference is that card organizations are rule-setters, directly charging fees for bank card transactions, whereas Alipay+ is more like an aggregated payment gateway. Its future profitability may rely more on value-added services such as risk control output, foreign exchange optimization, merchant solutions, and AI agent services, while also bearing costs for compliance and information transfer. "For now, card organizations, based on a century of development, are more efficient at making money."

In terms of revenue scale, Ant Digital Technologies is in the second tier among the three companies. A source close to Ant Digital Technologies revealed that its 2025 revenue was around 5 billion yuan, with a target of about 8 billion yuan for 2026. The company is currently near break-even. Ant Digital Technologies has never publicly disclosed its revenue before. In a media briefing in 2024, Zhao Wenbiao mentioned that the company's revenue was comparable to top domestic software companies and believed it would see several-fold growth between 2025 and 2027. Public information shows that in 2024, top domestic software companies like China National Software and Yonyou Network had annual revenues in the tens of billions of yuan. According to multiple sources, Ant Digital Technologies places great emphasis on revenue growth internally, using various methods to increase revenue, including assessing sales personnel on Token sales performance. "Ant Digital Technologies is not a large model vendor; selling Tokens is not its strength," said an insider from a leading large model company. "Its advantage lies mainly in the financial field, such as financial risk control and AI applications based on financial scenarios. Currently, its business positioning is not yet clear enough." At the beginning of its independence, Ant Digital Technologies summarized its main business as "ABC," corresponding to AI+, Blockchain+, and Cloud+. In 2025, amid the AI boom, the company merged its original AI and cloud business segments to build an AI product system centered on financial vertical large models. Currently, financial large models and intelligent agents are key areas of focus for Ant Digital Technologies. According to an IDC report, Ant Digital Technologies held a 13.3% market share in 2025, ranking first in China's financial large model, intelligent agent application, and services market. Si Erxun, IDC's China Financial Industry Research Manager, noted that Ant Digital Technologies, having originated from financial business, has a deeper understanding of financial operations and offers unique advantages in serving the financial industry, with its market share expected to increase further. Based on its accumulated experience, Ant Digital Technologies' capabilities in credit risk control and blockchain are widely recognized within the industry. However, the source close to the company noted that in recent years, regulators have consistently tightened control over the loan facilitation market, reducing the target customer base for credit risk control products. Meanwhile, the blockchain business, constrained by factors like the domestic regulatory environment, has a relatively limited market size. Recently, Ant Digital Technologies launched "Agentar 2.0," a core platform for its commercial intelligent agent super factory. Yan Ying, CTO of Ant Digital Technologies, stated in a public speech that the company will promote its intelligent agent business to more scenarios and customers, serving millions of enterprises and tens of millions of merchants. "Finance is the starting point, but not the boundary," she said.

Compared to Ant International and Ant Digital Technologies, OceanBase's business is relatively focused. Originating from Alipay's core transaction system, OceanBase is a leading domestic distributed database vendor. A recent report from CCID Consulting showed that OceanBase's revenue grew significantly in 2025, ranking first in the Chinese distributed database market. An insider stated that OceanBase's annualized revenue in 2026 exceeded 1.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of about 70%. OceanBase's core advantage also lies in financial scenarios. As of June 2026, OceanBase served over 400 financial institutions, including state-owned banks, joint-stock banks, city commercial banks, and rural commercial banks, with trillion-yuan-level banks accounting for nearly 70% of its clients. Some media have compared OceanBase to Databricks, calling it "China's Databricks." OceanBase's recent press release also cited this comparison, stating, "Databricks extends from data analysis and AI capabilities to databases, while OceanBase starts from distributed databases and financial core systems, expanding towards enterprise total data management, Agent data foundations, and data services." Public information shows Databricks is a data analytics and AI platform company that announced a strategic financing round on July 16, with a valuation of $188 billion. The AI strategy is a key factor supporting its high valuation. According to the "Database Development Research Report (2026)" by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, AI capabilities are evolving from an option to a key component of the architecture. The focus of capital market valuation logic is also shifting from "cloud-native" to "AI data platforms." Challenges are also evident. On one hand, the report notes that the AI wave brings a profound paradigm shift, requiring database vendors to develop new capabilities like vector search and memory management for intelligent agents. In this context, can OceanBase's technical capabilities, honed in financial transactions, continue to lead in the AI era? On the other hand, the latest data shows that Databricks' annualized revenue in 2026 exceeded $7 billion, with second-quarter revenue growing over 80% year-on-year. In terms of revenue scale, there is still a significant gap between OceanBase and Databricks.

Before its IPO was halted, Ant Group's valuation exceeded 2.1 trillion yuan, a figure that would still rank among the top in the A-share market today. According to the "2026 Hurun Global Unicorn Index," published in July 2026, Ant Group's valuation is 592 billion yuan, down 70% from six years ago, close to the 567.1 billion yuan valuation during its share buyback in 2023. As Ant Group's multiple subsidiaries test the capital markets, the outside world is also curious if Ant Group itself can ever go public in its entirety. "From a regulatory perspective, the time condition for Ant Group's change in actual controller has been met," said Miao Tianyi. "However, a group-wide listing faces more complex issues: regulatory constraints on the group's financial business, valuation restructuring of its massive business volume, and investor repricing of the overall business model. Overall, a group-wide listing has theoretical possibility, but the probability is relatively limited. Even if pursued, it would be a lengthy process requiring the maturation of multiple internal and external conditions before it could materialize, lacking a realistic foundation in the short term." Spinning off subsidiaries for listing is a more realistic path. This raises a core question: If business segments like Ant International, OceanBase, and Ant Digital Technologies list independently, can they drive Ant Group's overall valuation back to its peak? In the aforementioned Hurun list, Ant Group is classified under the fintech industry, which leads some market participants to question its growth potential. "Ant Group in 2020 was at the peak of the Chinese stock market, but the mainstream market narrative has shifted to hard tech and AI," said the tech sector investor. "The era of fintech is over. For the current capital market, Ant Group may be a thing of the past." A similar situation is unfolding globally. "The industry focus is shifting from fintech transactions to AI platforms," said Hurun, Chairman and Chief Research Officer of the Hurun Group. "Fintech and AI currently have 216 and 215 unicorn companies respectively, making them the world's leading unicorn tracks. However, the total value of AI unicorns is nearly three times that of fintech companies." Amidst this drastic environmental change, Ant Group is attempting to pivot. In July 2023, Ant Group received a record administrative penalty of 7.123 billion yuan from financial regulators, marking the basic completion of its nearly three-year financial business rectification. During this period, Ant Group adjusted the voting rights of its major shareholders, introduced independent directors, and had its management step down from Alibaba's partnership to strengthen separation from the Alibaba Group. Jack Ma ceased to be the actual controller of Ant Group. In the same year, Ant Group proposed three major strategies: "AI First," "Alipay's Dual Flywheel," and "Accelerating Globalization," and drove organizational restructuring the following year to implement further reforms. In the 2023 Sustainable Development Report, published in June 2024, Eric Jing summarized Ant Group's business model as using technological innovation to provide more development opportunities for SMEs and ordinary people. The report also announced that in the next decade, Ant Group will focus on two key technological areas: AI and data elements. From 2023 to 2025, Ant Group's technology investment grew from 21.19 billion yuan to 35.03 billion yuan, a compound annual growth rate of 28.6%, far exceeding its profit growth rate. In 2025 alone, technology investment surged nearly 50% year-on-year. In 2025, with DeepSeek driving the wave of AI application, Ant Group made significant investments in AI applications, including "saturated investment" in areas like AI payments and the AI medical application "A-Fu." The annual report of Alibaba showed that Ant Group's net profit in 2025 was approximately 15.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year decline of about 60%, primarily due to increased investment in new growth initiatives (including user growth) and technology. Since 2023, the once-highly anticipated financial business has gradually faded into the background. Within Ant Group, the credit and other financial segments are jokingly referred to as the "living expense department," meaning they earn money for "A-Fu." From scattered public data, the financial business segment remains a significant profit pillar for Ant Group. Public information shows that in 2025, the net profits of Ant Group's subsidiaries, including MYbank, Chongqing Ant Consumer Finance, and Ant Fund, were 3.29 billion yuan, 3.111 billion yuan, and 1.085 billion yuan respectively. The combined net profit of these three segments alone accounts for nearly half of Ant Group's total profit. However, cultivating new businesses takes time. In May 2026, Alipay announced that its AI payment transaction volume had exceeded 300 million. However, according to the relevant business head, the majority of these transactions came from developers calling the large model, with at least 90% originating from the general-purpose intelligent agent Qianwen under Alibaba. At that time, Li Jiajia, Co-President of Alipay's Digital Payment Business Group, stated that Alipay is not considering business, revenue, or competition in the AI payment sector, but simply wants to play the role of the AI payment infrastructure to first build the ecosystem. On August 7, Zhang Junjie, Vice President of Ant Group and President of the Ant Health Business Group, revealed during a speech that "A-Fu" has served over 130 million users cumulatively. However, according to QuestMobile's "2026 AI Application Market Development Semi-Annual Report," the active user count of the "Ant A-Fu" app was 28.97 million in June 2026, an increase of about 2 million from 26.89 million in December 2025. In a previous exclusive interview, Han Xinyi disclosed that in December 2025, after Ant Group renamed "AQ" to "A-Fu," it spent several hundred million yuan on advertising in a single month. The company plans to continue advertising for "A-Fu" in 2026 until its user base reaches a scale where it can begin to spread organically. Looking ahead, the true performance of Ant Group's AI business remains to be further tested by the market, and it will be key to the company's future valuation upgrade. The aforementioned tech sector investor noted that under the new circumstances, high-valuation tech companies all need to answer a question: "Can you help Chinese industries secure pricing power on a global scale?"