Ant Research
Ant Research (蚂蚁技术研究院) is Ant Group's research institute, dedicated to useful and imaginative scientific research. It targets frontier technologies, tackles key technical challenges, and promotes deep industry-university-research integration to support the digital economy.
At a Glance
- Universities and academic researchers
- Research institutes and technology companies
- Enterprise engineering and AI teams
- Financial services and fintech
- +2 more
AI Tools by Ant Research
(1)
AntOmniEvo
Open Source Agent Auto Evolution
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Latest News
2026 CCF–Ant Research Fund second batch opened for applications, with 16 research topics.
Ant Research published an InTech Award profile of Feng Bao describing technology that visualizes how genes are distributed throughout the body.
Ant Research published an InTech Award profile of Chang Qiao describing work that visualizes cancer-cell division.
Ant Group research-intern recruitment opened for data research and engineering R&D roles in the Industrial Data Systems department.
Products & Services
An Apache-2.0 open-source auto-evolution framework for AI agent systems, workflows/pipelines, and single-file algorithms. It treats prompts, skills, workflow configuration, and code as tunable artifacts and uses coding-agent proposers plus evaluation-driven evolutionary optimization to improve them.
Researches vision and NLP foundation models and general-AI algorithm architectures, including content generation, multimodal understanding, digital-human technology, 3D vision, image/video generation and editing, and video understanding.
Researches financial-grade distributed HTAP database technology for the cloud era; the laboratory is led by Chuanhui Yang, CTO of Ant Group's OceanBase enterprise distributed relational database.
Focuses on key technology innovation for next-generation AGI models.
Market Position
Ant Research is positioned as a corporate, application-oriented research institute combining frontier AI/data research with Ant Group's production-scale financial-technology scenarios, academic joint laboratories, and open-source releases. In research scope it competes for talent, partnerships, and visibility with Chinese corporate labs such as Alibaba DAMO Academy, Tencent AI Lab, Baidu Research, and Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, and with global industrial AI labs such as Google DeepMind and Microsoft Research; its differentiator is the combination of industry deployment, university collaboration, and open-source engineering.
Leadership
Executive Team
Zhengyu He (何征宇)
Vice President of Ant Group; Chief Technology Officer; Dean of Ant Research
Earned a computer science PhD from Georgia Tech in 2012; worked at Google from 2012 to 2018, where he founded and led the open-source gVisor project; joined Ant Group in 2018 and led cloud-native transformation, green computing, confidential-computing innovation, and open-source strategy.
Founding Story
Ant Research says it was formally established in April 2015 to look toward a digital and intelligent future, pursue frontier technology, tackle key core technologies, and connect academic research with industry, applications, and technology commercialization.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Ant Research is a corporate research institute rather than a separately marketed subscription business. Its public model centers on Ant Group-funded R&D, academic collaboration, research grants, fellowships, and open-source technology; AntOmniEvo is published under Apache License 2.0.
Target Markets
- Universities and academic researchers
- Research institutes and technology companies
- Enterprise engineering and AI teams
- Financial services and fintech
- Public sector, telecommunications, retail, and internet businesses needing data infrastructure
- Healthcare, robotics, and autonomous-intelligence research organizations
- Frontier AI and AGI research
- Multimodal generation, image/video editing, 3D reconstruction, and digital humans
- AI agents, skills, prompts, memory, and harness optimization
- Workflow and pipeline optimization
- Distributed databases and financial-grade data infrastructure
- Privacy-preserving computing, blockchain, and data security