(Bloomberg) — Jack Ma-backed Ant Group Co. is in discussions to acquire Chinese online platform Haodf.com to beef up its artificial intelligence services in health care, according to people familiar with the matter.

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The fintech company is seeking to integrate its technology with a platform like Haodf that provides online consultations with doctors, the people said, requesting not to be named because the discussions are private. The deliberations are still preliminary and could be subject to change, the people said.

Ant is seeking for new avenues of growth following a broad overhaul of its business in March. The firm’s profit fell 10% in the March quarter, following a yearslong regulatory crackdown that dented its online loan operation.

The firm didn’t respond to an email query. Haodf, registered as Beijing HaoDF Online Network Co., didn’t respond to queries sent to its email address listed on its website. Yicai reported about the acquisition earlier.

Haodf.com received funding from companies including Tencent Holdings Ltd. and DCM Ventures. It had an estimated value of 6.5 billion yuan ($906 million) in its last funding round in 2017, according to EO Data.

Ant has been expanding in AI and invested more than 100 million yuan into a video generation startup AIsphere in April. It has also been using the technology for foreign exchange transaction and fraud detection.

Ant received regulatory approval from the Chinese government to roll out products powered by its large language model Bailing to the public in November. It developed two in-house applications underpinned by LLM for wealth management and insurance services. Zhixiaobao answers questions for customers, and Zhixiaozhu, is an assistant for financial professionals.

Ant also open sourced its AI-powered coding platform CodeFuse for developers. It spent a record 21.2 billion yuan on research last year.

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