Jack Ma's PayPal Rival just closed the single largest funding round for a tech company, EVER​

China’s economy is stabilizing, and its tech and venture-capital sectors are booming as a result. While American venture capitalists have been carefully hedging their bets and warning their portfolio companies about burn rates, China is the biggest source of venture funding in the world, with a whopping$231 billion under management. It comes as no surprise, then, that a Chinese fintech business has raised an unprecedented $4.5 billion funding round, the world’s largest-ever single round of funding for a privately owned tech company,The Wall Street Journal reports.

Ant Financial, which owns China’s PayPal rival Alipay, is now valued at roughly $60 billion, after raising an undisclosed Series A round of funding last year that valued the payments platform at$45 to $50 billion. Alipay is already the biggest online-payments service in China, withmore than 450 million active users. The new valuation is another feather in the cap of billionaireJack Ma,theBezos-esqechairman and founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, who is Ant Financial’s largest stakeholder. Ma spun off Ant Financial from Alibaba, which is partially owned byMarissa Mayer’sYahoo, in 2011, though Alibaba remains entitled to about a third of its equity value. New shareholders in the company include Primavera Capital Group, a private-equity fund managed by former Goldman Sachs chairman for ChinaFred Hu,as well as the Postal Savings Bank of China’s parent company, China Post Group; Chinese sovereign-wealth fund China Investment Corp; and China Development Bank Capital.

The latest injection of capital elevates Ant Financial to nearly the same status as Uber, which raised new funding in December valuing the company at$62 billion. Alibaba’s $25 billion I.P.O. in 2014 didn’t include Ant Financial, which is planning its ownChinese I.P.O. in 2017.

(VANITY FAIR)