Chinese local-services giant (food delivery, hotels, Dianping, Mobike) headquartered in Beijing; since 2023 it has been developing its own LongCat model family and autonomous delivery drones and vehicles.
Meituan (美团, Měituán — 'beautiful group') is a Chinese local-services technology giant headquartered in Beijing, founded in May 2010 by Wang Xing. Originally a Groupon clone for the Chinese market, today it is China's largest food delivery platform (>65% market share, Ele.me a distant second at <30%), the country's largest restaurant-reviews platform (following the Dianping merger in October 2015), and a dominant player in hotels, movie tickets, instant retail, ride-hailing and bike-sharing (Mobike acquired in April 2018 for $2.7B). The company went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on September 20, 2018 (3690.HK) at a debut price of HK$69 and is a Hang Seng Index component. In September 2020 it renamed from 'Meituan Dianping' back to just 'Meituan'. By the end of 2024 it had over 770M annual transacting users and 14.5M annual active merchants on its platform, with 108,900 employees. In 2023 it entered the AI sector by acquiring the Light Year startup for $281M; in September 2025 it released its first open-source LLM in the LongCat family (LongCat-Flash-Chat), followed by LongCat-Flash-Thinking (CoT), LongCat-Flash-Omni (multimodal), LongCat-Flash-Lite (MoE), LongCat-Video (October 2025), and LongCat-Image 6B (December 2025). LongCat models power the Xiaomei AI agent (September 2025) for food orders and hotel bookings. Meituan also develops autonomous delivery drones (Meituan UAV, 4th generation since 2023, 5 km range, Pony.ai partnership) and self-driving delivery vehicles (since 2021, Li Auto partnership based on the SEV design). International expansion runs under the Keeta brand: Hong Kong (May 2023), Saudi Arabia ($266.6M investment, September 2024, plan to capture 80% of the KSA market by 2025), Qatar (August 2025), UAE (September 2025), Brazil (October 2025).
Founders
Chinese entrepreneur, graduate of Tsinghua University and the University of Delaware. Before Meituan he founded Xiaonei (a Chinese Facebook clone, 2005, later sold as Renren) and Fanfou (a Twitter clone, 2007, shut down in 2009 by Chinese censorship). In May 2010 he founded Meituan as a Groupon clone for the Chinese market; he drove the merger with Dianping (2015) and the Hong Kong IPO (2018).
Classification
