Ant International Raises $1.2 Billion to Expand Blockchain-Powered Payment Rails
Ant International has closed a Series A equity round of approximately $1.2 billion, with existing backers Ant Group and Alibaba Group joined by a group of undisclosed international institutional investors. The round follows weeks of reporting that pegged the target closer to $1 billion at a pre-money valuation near $10 billion, meaning the final raise came in above earlier expectations.
The Singapore-headquartered company was carved out of Ant Group as an independently operated business in 2024. It now connects more than 150 million merchants with over 2 billion user accounts globally, running the business through four units: Alipay+ for cross-border wallet interoperability, Antom for merchant payment acceptance, WorldFirst for cross-border trade payments, and Bettr for SME lending and treasury services.
Where the blockchain angle sits
The proceeds are earmarked for merchant payment, account management, and inclusive financial services for SMEs — but the more interesting story for this audience is the settlement layer underneath that expansion. Ant International has spent the past two years building out Whale, its proprietary blockchain infrastructure for payment processing and treasury management. By 2024, more than a third of the volume moving through Ant International’s network was already settling on blockchain rails, out of a network that handled over $1 trillion in total transaction volume that year.
The company has also moved to bring stablecoins directly into its payment stack. Through a partnership with Circle, USDC has been integrated into portions of Ant International’s cross-border flows, allowing certain transactions to settle without routing through traditional correspondent banking. Separately, Ant International has run tokenized-liquidity pilots with Standard Chartered covering both Singapore dollar and Hong Kong dollar settlement, and both firms are participants in Hong Kong’s Ensemble Sandbox program exploring further tokenization use cases.
Why the raise matters beyond the headline number
A fresh $1.2 billion primary round gives Ant International both capital and a valuation marker as speculation persists about an eventual Hong Kong listing — talk that has resurfaced periodically since Ant Group’s own IPO was suspended by Chinese regulators in 2020. Revenue at Ant International reportedly grew around 25% in 2025 after topping $3 billion in 2024, and the business has been profitable for several consecutive quarters, which changes the framing from a bridge round to a growth-capital raise made from a position of strength.
For blockchain-payments watchers specifically, the signal is less about the equity check and more about what it funds: a company that already routes a meaningful share of its trillion-dollar-plus transaction volume through tokenized rails is now better capitalized to keep pushing stablecoin settlement, treasury tokenization, and blockchain-based FX further into the core of global merchant payments — rather than treating it as a side experiment.