Chinese food delivery service, Meituan-Dianping gets $4bn in funding round led by Tencent
Chinese food and retail delivery service, Meituan-Dianping, has secured $4bn in a new investment round.
Meituan.com was founded in 2002 as a Chinese group buying site for local consumer products and retail services. It merged with a fellow group buying site, Dianping, in 2015.
The tech service offers food delivery and daily deals. It is currently the world’s largest online and on-demand deliver platform and received up to 10mn orders per day, with over 280mn registered users.
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Before the most recent funding round, which was led by Tencent, the company had already accumulated $3.3bn and is now valued at $30bn in total.
The company claims to have “the largest servce0focused ecommerce platform in China” and is a rival to Alibaba’s growing ambition with localised ecommerce, which is perhaps why Alibaba rival Tencent have chosen to invest so heavily.
In 2015, Alibaba set up Kuobei with $1bn to focus on the localised ecommerce niche. Other competition for Meituan-Dianping include apps like Ele.me which offers meal delivery and has received $2bn from Alibaba.
According to CEO Wang Xing, the company “is leading a major transformation of China’s traditional services industry… Customers are able to access various types of services, from restaurant reservations to on-demand delivery, hotel and travel bookings, and entertainment, all through a single mobile application.”
The company announced earlier this year it hopes to develop a ride-hailing service.