Jack Ma founded Alibaba with a team of friends and colleagues in Hangzhou in 1999.
Ma and his group established Alibaba as a business-to-business e-commerce marketplace intended to connect Chinese companies with buyers around the world. The venture was launched from Ma’s apartment on June 28, 1999, with 17 friends and students commonly identified as part of the founding team.
Alibaba later expanded beyond its original marketplace. In 2003, Ma created Taobao to compete with eBay’s push into China. The wider Alibaba ecosystem eventually included Tmall, Alibaba Cloud and other major online services. Investments from Goldman Sachs and SoftBank helped provide capital during the company’s early growth.
A common mix-up is Pony Ma, founder of Tencent, or Robin Li, founder of Baidu. Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance. Jack Ma’s birth name is Ma Yun, and he became the public face and long-serving chairman of Alibaba Group.