Chinese financial technology giant Ant Group spins off database firm OceanBase, selling stake to Alibaba

Alibaba Holding Group has become a new shareholder in OceanBase, the database company founded by the fintech affiliate of the e-commerce giant Group of antsas the startup overhauled its shareholder structure and spun off into a separate entity. Alibaba is one of 35 new shareholders that took part in OceanBase’s latest funding round on Saturday. Several big names in Chinese venture capital also participated, including China Capital Investment Group, Hongshan and Yunfeng Capital, according to the information platform of China’s Tianyancha enterprise registry.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The new capital injection means OceanBase is no longer a wholly owned subsidiary of Ant, which started its database business in 2010. It’s a major step toward lining up any potential public listing for the startup.

Ant had already announced in March that it intended to make OceanBase one of three independent business units with their own boards. The other two companies are Ant International and Ant Digital Technologies. The separation was expected to spur growth and innovation.

The companies will each launch their own employee stock option program, which will be “more compatible with their start-up status,” Ant said in an internal letter at the time.

OceanBase is an open-source distributed relational database developed by Ant and used to manage the avalanche of data collected through the mobile payment app Alipay and in support of Singles DayChina’s largest online shopping event, initiated by Alibaba, among other use cases.

Tianyancha does not show the total amount OceanBase raised in its funding round, but Hangzhou Junhan and Hangzhou Junao, two Alibaba-affiliated entities, are listed as the two largest shareholders with 25.4 percent and 19.7 percent, respectively. Junhan contributed 50.9 million yuan (US$7 million) while Junao contributed 39.4 million yuan.

Co-founder of Alibaba Jack Ma owns 1.1 percent of Junhan, while Junao counts Alibaba’s current CEO and his predecessor as shareholders, according to Tianyancha. The adjustment comes after Ant took several steps to restructure the company following the last-minute cancellation of its $39.7 billion initial public offering in Shanghai and Hong Kong in November 2020, amid regulatory scrutiny. In January 2023, Group of ants announced it would dilute the voting power of Ma, who also founded that company, to make China’s largest fintech firm more “transparent and diversified.” That was seen as a crucial step in fine-tuning its much anticipated The IPO is back on track.

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