Ant Group's Four Subsidiaries Launch Intensive Fundraising, Spin-off IPO Expectations Heat Up
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Four Ant Group subsidiaries launched external fundraising within two weeks, targeting a combined haul exceeding 10 billion yuan — the group's first large-scale outside capital raise in six years, widely read by the market as a prelude to spin-off IPOs.
Four subsidiaries raising at once — how much is each targeting?
Ant International closed an approximately $1.2 billion Series A at a target valuation of at least $10 billion; it may file for a Hong Kong IPO as early as this year.
OceanBase — Ant's in-house database software — is seeking a Series A of 2–3 billion yuan; annualized revenue already tops 1.4 billion yuan, up roughly 70% year-on-year.
Ant Digital Technologies (蚂蚁数科) is preparing a Pre-IPO round, slightly behind OceanBase; 2025 revenue was about 5 billion yuan, with a 2026 target of roughly 8 billion yuan.
Ant Lingbo Technology — Ant's AI hardware arm — has launched its first round, targeting 1.5 billion yuan, with plans to close two rounds this year.
After the fundraising, how far away is an IPO?
People close to Ant say this round is more of a "checkpoint on each unit's ability to operate independently" — talk of an IPO is premature.
Yet multiple institutional investors say that once outside capital is in, a listing is only a matter of time.
OceanBase CEO Yang Bing has said the goal is to list in roughly three to four years; Ant Digital CEO Zhao Wenbiao says there is "no timetable yet," but at the current growth rate the push could come around 2027.
The valuation question: fintech multiples or AI multiples?
One tech-focused investor told Caijing: fintech companies trade at roughly 30× P/E, while AI companies command 80× or higher.
This means → the same business, labeled differently, can see its valuation ceiling more than double.
Ant International holds over 70 payment licenses worldwide and is squarely in the fintech lane; OceanBase and Ant Digital hold no financial licenses and both ramped up AI investment in 2025, aiming to claim AI-tier valuations.
Ant Digital benchmarks itself against Palantir — the U.S. big-data analytics and enterprise AI platform — whose latest market cap exceeds $410 billion.
"De-financializing" is easy to say — but is the revenue there?
OceanBase disclosed that over 60% of its 2021 revenue came from financial-sector clients, dropping to about 50% in 2022; Yang Bing expects the split to reach roughly 50-50 by 2026.
Ant Digital CEO Zhao Wenbiao acknowledged that finance is the unit's "natural endowment"; in 2025 both the financial and new-energy verticals achieved 100% revenue growth.
In plain terms = both companies want to tell an AI story for higher multiples, but more than half the money still comes from banking clients — investors will watch that ratio closely.
Independence — the hardest hurdle before any listing
Miao Tianyi, managing partner at Puzhuo Capital, said independence is the baseline threshold for a registration-based IPO; if related-party transactions stay high, even strong financials become a material obstacle.
In March 2024 Ant announced that three subsidiaries had formed separate boards and begun operating independently — nearly two and a half years ago.
This means → the real test of this fundraising blitz is not "can they raise the money" but whether each unit can prove it generates cash on its own, apart from the parent.
Content is for reference only, not financial advice.