Ant International, the overseas arm of China’s Ant Group, said on July 21, 2026, that it had closed a Series A equity round of about $1.2 billion. Existing investors Ant Group and Alibaba Group took part, alongside international institutions the company did not name. The proceeds will fund cross-border payments, treasury, credit, and agentic commerce for merchants worldwide. It is one of the largest payments raises of the year, and it shows Asia’s biggest cross-border player building new infrastructure for AI-driven commerce and stablecoin settlement.
Four businesses and 150 million merchants
Ant International was carved out in 2024, in the restructuring that followed Chinese regulators’ suspension of Ant Group’s IPO in late 2020. It now runs as a separate company with its own board. It says it operates in more than 100 markets across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, through four complementary businesses.
| Brand | Role |
|---|---|
| Alipay+ | Cross-border payments and wallets (QR codes, e-commerce) |
| Antom | Merchant acquiring and payment acceptance |
| WorldFirst | Accounts and payments for exporting SMEs |
| Bettr | Credit and financing technology |
Ant sought a valuation of at least $10 billion
Bloomberg reported that Ant International was seeking a valuation of at least $10 billion for the round. Several financial outlets see a Hong Kong IPO as a possible next step. Press reports also put 2025 revenue at about $3.7 billion, up roughly 25% from a year earlier. Treat those numbers with caution: the company does not publish audited financial statements.
Agentic commerce is the main bet
Beyond merchant payments and account services for small businesses, the round will fund two growth areas: cross-border payments and agentic commerce, in which an AI agent picks, orders, and pays for a purchase on the user’s behalf, within limits the user sets.
On applied AI, the company points to Falcon TST, its FX forecasting model, which Ant says has cut its internal FX costs by up to 60%. That matters at scale. On large cross-border flows, every basis point saved on FX and routing turns into margin for merchants and pricing that can undercut traditional rails.
Stablecoins move into the settlement stack
Ant International has integrated Circle’s USDC stablecoin into its cross-border settlement infrastructure and is pursuing regulated issuer licenses in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Luxembourg. The volumes explain the ambition: according to the financial press, Ant International processed about $1 trillion in 2024, roughly a third of it settled on blockchain. Ant Group chairman Eric Jing frames the thesis this way: AI and tokenized settlement technology can make financial services more accessible.
A partner and a rival for European PSPs
For European PSPs and merchants, Ant International is both an acceptance partner, offering access to Asian wallets through Alipay+, and a rising competitor in cross-border payments, a market long dominated by correspondent banking and by the Visa and Mastercard networks. Account-to-account infrastructure paired with stablecoins, settling around the clock at lower cost, goes straight at those rails. Demand is there: according to PYMNTS Intelligence, 36% of internationally active SMBs expect to use a fintech or payment provider for cross-border payments in 2026, up from 30% in 2025.