Ant Group

Ant Group spun out a cross-border arm, Ant International, which began independent operation in 2024. Ant International describes itself as a leading global digital payment, digitisation and financial technology provider with main operations across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.^[1]

The unit says it has built a partnership network connecting more than 150 million global merchants with more than 2 billion user accounts, through relationships with banks, card organizations, mobile payment leaders and tech enterprises.^[1]

Ant Group proposed a share buyback on July 8, 2023 that would value the company at about 567.1 billion yuan, or $78.5 billion, according to Fortune's report on the plan, citing Ant's own statement. That valuation was almost 70% lower than the roughly $280 billion the company was valued at for its scrapped 2020 initial public offering.^[2]

Ant Group's 2023 buyback let each investor sell up to 7.6% of their equity rather than cash out completely, Fortune reported, citing a person familiar with the arrangement. Silver Lake Management, Warburg Pincus and Carlyle Group were among the biggest US backers of the 2018 funding round being unwound; Singapore's GIC, Khazanah Nasional, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Temasek Holdings also invested in that round, at a time when Ant was valued at about $150 billion.^[2]

Ant International, Ant Group's cross-border payments unit, closed a Series A equity financing of approximately $1.2 billion on July 20, 2026, according to the company's own announcement, carried by Yahoo Finance via Business Wire. Existing investors including Ant Group and Alibaba Group participated alongside other international investment institutions.^[1]

The sources opened for this profile do not disclose Ant Group's current overall ownership structure, a post-buyback valuation, or whether the 2023 repurchase plan has closed, so none of those figures is given here.^[2]

Ant Group's initial public offering, which would have been the world's largest, was scrapped by Chinese regulators, Fortune's 2023 report says, without giving the exact 2020 date in the text opened.^[2]

Ant Group has since moved into physical-world robotics investing. MLQ News reports that Ant Group launched its own robotics subsidiary, RobbyAnt, in late 2024, and debuted the R1 humanoid robot at IFA Berlin in 2025.^[3],[1]

Jack Ma co-founded Ant Group and remains closely associated with it in press coverage; Fortune's 2023 report describes the 2023 buyback plan as being proposed by the "Jack Ma-backed Ant Group Co."^[2]

Ant International's Series A financing release says the unit connects more than 150 million global merchants with more than 2 billion user accounts across banks, card organizations, mobile payment companies and tech enterprises, giving a sense of the scale of Ant's partner network, even though it covers the Ant International subsidiary rather than Ant Group as a whole.^[1]

Ant Group's own portfolio companies have become a growing set of partners. MLQ News reports Ant's humanoid-robotics investments span full-stack robot makers Unitree and Galaxea along with component and software specialists Linkerbot, Hypershell and Genrobot AI.^[3]

The sources opened for this profile name Tencent as a company facing a similar Chinese regulatory crackdown alongside Ant Group, per Fortune, but none of the opened sources names a direct fintech competitor to Alipay's payments business, so no competitor list is given here.^[2]