China’s very less known startup Meituan has become world’s fourth-most valuable startup after the recent funding of $4 billion (Rs.25000 crores). The total value of this brand is now nearly $30 billion (Rs.1950000 crores). This company is based in Beijing and solves multi-purposes such as delivering food to homes, selling groceries and movie tickets, reviewing restaurants, and providing discounts to consumers who buy in groups. This startup is not much known beyond China and started getting big funds from January 2016.
CEO Wang Xing revealed in a recent interview that “Meituan-Dianping is leading a major transformation of China’s traditional services industry by connecting them to shoppers through their apps. 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.”
It all started when Meituan.com and Dianping.com decided to merge together to expand their businesses in 2015. Meituan.com was a group-buying website providing local consumer services. Meituan was founded by Xing Wang in 2010. Whereas, Dianping was a website providing independent consumer reviews on local services. Dianping was launched in April 2003 by Tao Zhang and co-founded by Jason Li, Bo Zhang, Shuhong Ye, and Edward Long.
The major investors in this successful startup are Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Trustbridge Partners, Tiger Global Management, Coatue Management and the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC. Meituan-Dianping is popularly called O2O in China having full form as online to offline. In short, it connects the offline sellers with the buyers online and has received up to 21 million orders per day.
This story can encourage a lot of startups which are working in India to improve the connectivity between online buyers and offline sellers.
