Alibaba Group Holding has become a new shareholder of OceanBase, the database company founded by the e-commerce giant’s fintech affiliate Ant Group, as the start-up overhauled its shareholding structure and spun off into a separate entity.
Alibaba is one of 35 new shareholders that took part in OceanBase’s latest funding round last Saturday. A number of big names in Chinese venture capital also took part, including China Capital Investment Group, HongShan and Yunfeng Capital, according to Chinese business registry information platform Tianyancha.
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
The new capital injection means OceanBase is no longer a wholly owned subsidiary under Ant, which started the database operation in 2010. It is an important step in lining up any potential public listing for the start-up.
Ant had already announced in March that it intended to make OceanBase one of three independent business units with their own boards of directors. The other two companies are Ant International and Ant Digital Technologies. The separation was expected to spur growth and innovation.
The companies will each roll out their own employee share option programmes, 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 that Ant developed and uses in managing the deluge of data collected through the mobile payment app Alipay and in support of Singles’ Day, China’s largest online shopping extravaganza started by Alibaba, among other use cases.
Tianyancha does not display the total amount that OceanBase raised in its funding round, but Hangzhou Junhan and Hangzhou Junao – two entities affiliated with Alibaba – are listed as the two biggest shareholders at 25.4 per cent and 19.7 per cent, respectively. Junhan contributed 50.9 million yuan (US$7 million) while Junao contributed 39.4 million yuan.
Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma owns 1.1 per cent of Junhan, while Junao counts Alibaba’s current chief executive 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 US$39.7 billion initial public offering in Shanghai and Hong Kong in November 2020 amid regulatory scrutiny.
In January 2023, Ant Group announced that 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 deemed a crucial step in putting its highly anticipated IPO back on track.