OceanBase responds to funding report: fully committed to AI data innovation, maintaining open communication with capital markets

On July 29, OceanBase responded to reports regarding its first external equity financing, stating that the company is fully dedicated to data technology and product innovation in the AI era and will maintain open communication with capital markets. It did not provide further details on the financing scale, investment institutions, or specific progress. Earlier, media reported that OceanBase is in talks with investors for a Series A round, having approached several leading investment institutions, with a target financing of about 2-3 billion yuan. Insiders said the funding would help OceanBase enhance its independent operations and support its expansion into the AI data platform field. In recent years, OceanBase has been accelerating its AI data strategy, improving its ability to handle semi-structured and unstructured data like video. With AI applications increasingly entering enterprise production, database management systems are becoming key infrastructure connecting enterprise data, AI models, and intelligent agents. Insiders said OceanBase's annualized revenue in 2026 exceeded 1.4 billion yuan, up about 70% year-on-year. The company currently has thousands of customers, mainly in China, including Bank of Communications and China Mobile, and has started expanding into Southeast Asia, Japan, India, and Latin America. Media reports indicate OceanBase is benchmarking against companies like Databricks, though their development paths differ: Databricks extends from data analytics and AI capabilities to databases and enterprise applications, while OceanBase starts from distributed databases and core transaction systems to expand into enterprise full-data management, agent data supply, and data services. OceanBase was created in 2010, initially for internal database management at Ant Group, and has long supported core systems in payments and finance, withstanding over a decade of Double 11 traffic peaks. According to an IDC report, OceanBase ranked first in China's distributed database on-premises deployment market share in 2025, serving industries including finance, telecommunications, transportation, manufacturing, retail, public services, and the internet. For the AI era, OceanBase is evolving from a distributed database to an AI data platform. In June, it released a new lake-house integrated AI database, currently being tested in dozens of customer scenarios, with plans to further commercialize it. This funding is a key step for OceanBase toward independent operations and market development. In 2024, OceanBase established an independent board and an independent employee equity incentive mechanism. Recently, Ant International also announced the completion of its Series A round. These changes indicate that new businesses incubated by Ant Group over the past few years around globalization, AI, and data are gradually establishing more independent governance, incentive, and financing mechanisms and are being tested by external markets.