Chinese fintech giant Ant Group spins off database firm OceanBase, giving Alibaba a stake

July 3, 2024

Alibaba Group Holding has turn out to be a brand new shareholder of OceanBase, the database firm based by the e-commerce large’s fintech affiliate Ant Group, because the start-up overhauled its shareholding construction and spun off right into a separate entity.

Alibaba is one among 35 new shareholders that took half in OceanBase’s newest funding spherical final Saturday. Quite a lot of huge names in Chinese language enterprise capital additionally took half, together with China Capital Funding Group, HongShan and Yunfeng Capital, in accordance with Chinese language enterprise registry data platform Tianyancha.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Publish.

The brand new capital injection means OceanBase is not a completely owned subsidiary underneath Ant, which began the database operation in 2010. It is a crucial step in lining up any potential public itemizing for the start-up.

Ant had already introduced in March that it meant to make OceanBase one among three impartial enterprise models with their very own boards of administrators. The opposite two corporations are Ant Worldwide and Ant Digital Applied sciences. The separation was anticipated to spur progress and innovation.

The businesses will every roll out their very own worker share choice programmes, which will likely be “extra suitable with their start-up standing”, Ant mentioned in an inside letter on the time.

OceanBase is an open-source distributed relational database that Ant developed and makes use of in managing the deluge of knowledge collected by means of the cell fee app Alipay and in assist of Singles’ Day, China’s largest on-line procuring extravaganza began by Alibaba, amongst different use instances.

Tianyancha doesn’t show the full quantity that OceanBase raised in its funding spherical, however Hangzhou Junhan and Hangzhou Junao – two entities affiliated with Alibaba – are listed as the 2 greatest shareholders at 25.4 per cent and 19.7 per cent, respectively. Junhan contributed 50.9 million yuan (US$7 million) whereas Junao contributed 39.4 million yuan.

Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma owns 1.1 per cent of Junhan, whereas Junao counts Alibaba’s present chief govt and his predecessor as shareholders, in accordance with Tianyancha.

The adjustment comes after Ant took a number of steps to restructure the corporate following the last-minute cancellation of its US$39.7 billion initial public offering in Shanghai and Hong Kong in November 2020 amid regulatory scrutiny.

In January 2023, Ant Group introduced that it might dilute the voting energy of Ma, who additionally based that firm, to make China’s largest fintech agency extra “clear and diversified”. That was deemed a vital step in placing its highly anticipated IPO again on observe.