OceanBase seeks $443M for AI database expansion push

Jack Ma-backed OceanBase is seeking as much as 3 billion yuan ($443 million) in Series A funding to bankroll its expansion into AI database services and operate more independently from Ant Group, according to people familiar with the matter.

Beijing OceanBase Technology Co. is in discussions with investors to raise 2 billion to 3 billion yuan in its first external funding round, the people said, asking not to be named because the matter is private. The company had more than $200 million in annualized revenue in 2026, up 70% from the prior year, they said.

"Database managers are becoming a critical layer of infrastructure that connects enterprise data with AI models and agents," one of the people said. OceanBase is bolstering its ability to handle semi-structured and unstructured data like videos, beyond traditional structured data, and is looking at San Francisco-based Databricks Inc. as a benchmark.

Databricks said in February it was on track to generate $5.4 billion in annual revenue, including $1.4 billion from its AI products. The company is seeking capital at an $188 billion valuation. OceanBase's AI push builds on Lakebase, a product that supports vector search alongside documents, images and video — positioning it to compete in the market for AI-ready data infrastructure.

Originally built in 2010 to support Ant Group's internal database management, OceanBase underpins Ant's ability to process 500,000 transactions per second during Singles' Day. The company held the largest market share in China for distributed databases in 2025, according to an IDC report, competing against Huawei Technologies Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. Its thousands of clients are predominantly Chinese, including Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. and China Mobile Ltd.

OceanBase has started expanding to Southeast Asia, Japan, India and Latin America. Globally, tech firms including International Business Machines Corp., Snowflake Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. have been building out database management systems that integrate with AI workloads.

The funding round follows a shareholder restructuring that left OceanBase no longer wholly owned by Ant Group. Ant said OceanBase would have its own board and employee share option plan as part of the separation, giving the database company more strategic flexibility to pursue AI opportunities and international growth.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.