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Meituan (Chinese: 美团; pinyin: Měituán) is a Chinese technology platform that operates the country's largest on-demand local services business, spanning food delivery, in-store dining and travel bookings, hotel reservations, instant retail, and quick commerce. Headquartered in Beijing and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the ticker 3690, Meituan is best known internationally for its food delivery network, but the company has invested heavily in artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous logistics to lower the cost of last-mile delivery and to defend its position against rivals such as Alibaba's Ele.me and JD.com. By the end of 2024 Meituan reported more than 770 million annual transacting users and 14.5 million annual active merchants, with full-year revenue of 337.6 billion yuan and net profit of 35.8 billion yuan, up 158 percent year on year.[1][2]
Meituan's AI work clusters around three programs: a self-developed family of large language models called LongCat, an autonomous logistics business that combines an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) fleet branded Meituan Drone with ground-based autonomous delivery vehicles (ADVs), and a venture investment portfolio focused on embodied intelligence and humanoid robotics. In April 2025 Meituan became the first company in the world to receive a nationwide commercial drone delivery operating certificate, issued by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), allowing the company to fly its fourth-generation cargo drones across the entire country under one license rather than route by route.[3][4]
Meituan was founded in March 2010 by Wang Xing, a serial entrepreneur from Fujian who had previously launched the Chinese social networks Xiaonei (later sold and renamed Renren) and Fanfou. The company began as a group-buying site modelled on Groupon, offering daily discounted vouchers for restaurants, salons, and entertainment venues in Chinese cities. By 2013 Meituan had survived the so-called "thousand groupon war" that consolidated the Chinese coupon market, and it began expanding into adjacent verticals including movie tickets, hotel bookings, and food delivery.[5]
In October 2015 Meituan merged with Dianping, a Yelp-like restaurant review and group-buying platform founded in Shanghai by Zhang Tao in 2003. The combined entity, briefly known as Meituan-Dianping, was valued at roughly 15 billion U.S. dollars and consolidated the two leading local services platforms in China. The merger was financially backed by Tencent, which became one of Meituan's largest strategic shareholders, and gave the company a dominant position in restaurant reviews, in-store payments, and on-demand delivery.[6]
On 20 September 2018 Meituan-Dianping listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at an initial offer price of HK$69 per share, raising about 4.4 billion U.S. dollars in what was at the time the largest Chinese internet IPO since Alibaba. The company shortened its name back to Meituan in 2020 as part of a brand consolidation. Wang Xing remains chairman and chief executive officer, and the company employs roughly 109,000 people across its delivery, technology, and overseas operations.[7][2]
Meituan operates two reporting segments. Core Local Commerce covers food delivery (Meituan Waimai), in-store dining and entertainment, hotel and travel bookings, and the Meituan Instashopping quick-commerce service that delivers groceries, drugs, electronics, and convenience goods in roughly thirty minutes. New Initiatives includes the company's overseas delivery brand Keeta, the Meituan Select community group-buying business, B2B restaurant supply, the Meituan bike-sharing fleet, and the autonomous delivery, drone, and AI research businesses. Core Local Commerce contributed the bulk of 2024 revenue and operating profit, while New Initiatives narrowed its losses sharply as Keeta gained market share in Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia.[1]
Meituan's interest in artificial intelligence stretches back to the company's earliest dispatching work, but the modern AI program took shape in three waves. The first wave centered on operations research and machine learning models that powered the rider dispatch system, the second on computer vision for content moderation and merchant verification, and the third, beginning in 2023, on generative AI and large foundation models built in-house and through acquisitions.
In February 2023 Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen launched a Beijing-based artificial general intelligence startup called Light Year (Chinese: 光年之外, Guangnian Zhiwai), pitched as "China's OpenAI." Wang Huiwen invested 50 million U.S. dollars of his own money to seed the company at a 200 million dollar valuation and recruited a 70-person team that included senior researchers from leading Chinese tech firms. Wang Xing personally participated in Light Year's Series A round.[8]
In June 2023 Wang Huiwen stepped down from his executive roles for health reasons, and on 29 June 2023 Meituan announced it would acquire Light Year outright for 2.065 billion yuan (about 284 million U.S. dollars), comprising 234 million dollars in cash plus assumed liabilities. The deal absorbed Light Year's research team and intellectual property into Meituan and gave the company a foundational AI organization that would later evolve into the LongCat program.[9][8]
The LongCat team operates as Meituan's central foundation-model lab, named after the company's signature kangaroo-mascot logo and its early internal model. Wang Xing first publicly disclosed the existence of an internal large language model called LongCat during Meituan's first-quarter 2024 earnings call, telling investors the company was investing billions of yuan in GPU infrastructure and that the model was already improving employee productivity.[10] By 2025 Meituan had identified food delivery and AI as its two strategic priorities, and Wang Xing characterised the company's posture as "offensive" rather than defensive on AI investment.[1]
In September 2025 Meituan published the LongCat-Flash technical report on arXiv and released the model weights as open source under the MIT License through Hugging Face and GitHub. LongCat-Flash is a 560-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model that introduces two novel architectural ideas: "Zero-computation Experts," which dynamically allocates between 18.6 billion and 31.3 billion active parameters per token (averaging about 27 billion) based on the difficulty of the input, and "Shortcut-connected MoE," which expands the overlap window between computation and communication during distributed training and inference. The team trained the model on a curated data mixture and conducted targeted post-training on reasoning, code, instruction following, and tool use to push the model toward agentic behaviour.[11]
Meituan followed the base release with three additional open-weight variants. LongCat-Flash-Thinking, released later in September 2025, adds chain-of-thought reasoning capabilities while preserving the 560-billion-parameter MoE backbone.[12] LongCat-Flash-Lite is a slimmer model with 68.5 billion total parameters that activates only about 2.9 to 4.5 billion parameters per inference, designed for cost-sensitive deployments. LongCat-Flash-Omni is an omni-modal version released in late 2025 that adds real-time audio and visual interaction. Meituan continued the cadence with LongCat-Video in October 2025 for long-form video generation and LongCat-Image, a roughly six-billion-parameter image generation model, in December 2025.[11]
On 12 September 2025 Meituan launched Xiaomei (小美), a consumer-facing AI agent built on the LongCat-Flash-Chat model. Xiaomei is delivered as a separate mobile application that lets users order food, book hotels, and reserve restaurants by voice rather than by browsing menus. The launch came in the middle of an intense food-delivery price war in which Alibaba's Ele.me and JD.com had each pledged billions of yuan in subsidies to gain share, and Meituan positioned Xiaomei as a way to defend user engagement through a more conversational interface. The app initially required an invitation code from Meituan during the testing phase.[13]
Before the LongCat brand consolidated Meituan's foundation-model work, the company had piloted several stand-alone consumer apps. Wow, launched in November 2023, was a generative-AI social app that let users chat with AI personalities and create custom characters. Miaoshua experimented with image generation. These early apps operated outside Meituan's core local-services business and served as testbeds for prompt design and product surfaces, with much of the underlying expertise eventually folding into the LongCat team.
Meituan's longest-running AI deployment is its real-time courier dispatching system, which assigns roughly 80 million daily orders to a fleet of millions of riders. The system was first described in detail in a paper published in 2024 in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics, which earned the team a finalist nomination for the Franz Edelman Award. The platform performs city-level batch assignments every 30 seconds, evaluating route convenience, on-time risk, and rider acceptance probability for every candidate match. Since the system was deployed in 2019, Meituan reports a 20.96 percent reduction in average order delivery time and a 23.77 percent reduction in average rider travel distance per order, contributing to roughly 230 million dollars in annual cost savings.[14]
Meituan's vision AI team builds models for content moderation, merchant onboarding, and food safety. Production systems handle business-license recognition during merchant registration, identity verification for couriers, QR-code recognition for shared bicycle locks and pharmaceutical packaging, and image quality scoring for menu and storefront photographs. Meituan has stated that it is expanding investment in vision-based food safety tooling, including kitchen monitoring systems that flag hygiene problems in restaurant kitchens streamed to Meituan's platform.[15]
Meituan founded its UAV unit in 2017 and ran initial test flights at the Greater Bay Area's lower-altitude airspace before launching commercial service. The first commercial routes opened in Shenzhen in early 2021, when the city granted permission for low-altitude flights between rooftop launch pads on shopping malls and rooftop pickup lockers in nearby parks and residential complexes. Customers placed normal Meituan Waimai orders that, if the destination fell within an approved drone corridor, were dispatched to a rooftop pad and flown to a drop-off locker rather than handed to a ground rider.[16]
The Shenzhen pilot expanded steadily across 2022 and 2023, surpassing 100,000 cumulative drone deliveries in 2022 and crossing 300,000 cumulative orders across more than 30 routes by 2024. By the end of 2024 Meituan Drone had completed roughly 450,000 cumulative orders across 53 routes in mainland China, and by late 2025 the company reported 65 routes with more than 740,000 cumulative orders including international expansion to Hong Kong and Dubai.[3][16]
Meituan unveiled its self-developed fourth-generation cargo drone in 2024 and submitted it for type certification with the Civil Aviation Administration of China. The aircraft carries up to 2.5 kilograms of cargo, delivers within a three-kilometer radius in roughly 15 minutes, and can fly up to 10 kilometers from its origin pad, an approximately 35 percent range increase over the third-generation airframe. The drone is rated for operations between minus 20 and plus 50 degrees Celsius, withstands Beaufort Force 6 winds (roughly 49 km/h sustained), and continues flying through moderate rain and snow, a specification the company says covers more than 97 percent of Chinese urban weather year round.[3][4]
In April 2025 the CAAC granted the fourth-generation drone an operating certificate covering the entire territory of China, the first such nationwide low-altitude logistics license issued anywhere in the world. The license replaces the previous route-by-route approval process: rather than file a fresh application for each new corridor, Meituan can now open commercial routes inside CAAC-approved low-altitude airspace under a single certificate, reducing time to launch from months to days.[3][4]
In September 2025 Meituan began piloting nighttime drone delivery in Shenzhen, with evening operations covering Talent Park and Haifeng Sports Park.[17] In December 2025 Meituan introduced the M-Drone 4L, a long-range variant of the fourth-generation aircraft equipped with a Hesai FTX solid-state LiDAR sensor that provides positioning and obstacle avoidance without depending on satellite signals or visible-light cameras, making fully autonomous nighttime flight practical even in GNSS-degraded environments such as urban canyons.[18]
Meituan extended Meituan Drone overseas in two markets. In March 2025 the Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department approved the first commercial low-altitude logistics drop in the city, with a Meituan drone landing a meal at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology campus through the company's Keeta brand. The Hong Kong service is being expanded outward from Hong Kong Science Park to residential M-port lockers in Tseung Kwan O.[19] In December 2024 the Dubai Civil Aviation Authority issued Meituan's Keeta Air Delivery the first commercial drone delivery license in the United Arab Emirates, covering the Dubai Silicon Oasis area, with planned expansion to the Dubai Marina district.[20]
| City | First Commercial Route | Status as of late 2025 | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shenzhen | January 2021 | More than 30 routes; nighttime pilots since September 2025 | Original launch market and the largest single deployment |
| Beijing | 2022 | Multiple routes in office park clusters | Capital city flagship corridors |
| Shanghai | 2022 | Routes in central business districts | |
| Guangzhou | 2023 | Multiple Pearl River Delta routes | |
| Nanjing | 2023 | City-center park routes | |
| Hong Kong | March 2025 | First route at HKUST; expanding to Tseung Kwan O via Keeta | First Meituan drone service outside mainland China |
| Dubai (UAE) | December 2024 (license) | Routes in Dubai Silicon Oasis; Marina expansion planned | First Middle East drone deployment, operated under Keeta brand |
Meituan has run a parallel ground-based autonomous delivery program since 2016, when the Meituan Unmanned Distribution Department was founded. The team built a series of small electric four-wheeled robots that resemble miniature vans, with two side doors that lift open to reveal cargo bays. The vehicles travel at up to 20 km/h, carry roughly 150 kilograms of payload per trip, and operate in a hybrid model in which an autonomous van shuttles parcels along a fixed urban corridor while human couriers handle the "last hundred meters" between the van's stop and the customer's door.[21]
In February 2020, Meituan began piloting autonomous vehicle deliveries in Beijing's Shunyi district during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, when contactless delivery saw a sharp surge in demand. In April 2021 the company introduced its second-generation Magic Bag (Mai Shen Wu) van and started normalised commercial operations in Shunyi. In May 2021 Meituan, JD.com, and Neolix received the first batch of public-road autonomous delivery licenses for Beijing's Yizhuang and Shunyi areas.[22]
The ADV program has grown into one of China's largest. Industry data published by the People's Daily in October 2025 reported that more than 6,000 autonomous delivery vehicles were operating across more than 100 city zones in China by the end of 2024, with Meituan one of the leading deployers alongside JD Logistics and Neolix.[23] Meituan's own fleet had logged hundreds of millions of kilometers and several million orders by the end of 2024.
In March 2023 Meituan announced a strategic partnership with the Chinese autonomous driving company Pony.ai to jointly develop unmanned delivery vehicles. The two firms agreed to build vehicles around Pony.ai's autonomous driving controller, which runs on Nvidia's DRIVE Orin platform, and targeted at least 10,000 delivery robots on the streets of first-tier Chinese cities by the end of 2024. Pony.ai also agreed to supply Meituan with autonomous delivery vehicle-specific domain controllers under a multi-year arrangement.[24]
| Generation | Year Introduced | Key Specifications | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Generation 1 | 2018 (test) | Indoor and campus pilots | Used for canteen, office park, and hospital deliveries |
| Generation 2 (Magic Bag / Mai Shen Wu) | 2020-2021 | 150 kg payload, up to 20 km/h, Level 4 autonomy on fixed routes | Normalised operations in Beijing Shunyi from April 2021 |
| Public road licensed fleet | 2021 onward | Tested in Beijing Yizhuang and Shunyi alongside JD and Neolix | First Chinese ADV public-road licenses |
| Pony.ai joint platform | 2023 onward | Pony.ai DRIVE Orin controller, urban level 4 | Plan to scale fleet across first-tier cities |
Beyond its in-house drone and ADV teams, Meituan operates an active venture program that backs Chinese robotics startups, especially those building humanoid and embodied AI systems that could feed into Meituan's logistics and merchant services in the future. Industry tracker 36Kr reported that Meituan made eight consecutive robotics investments between mid-2024 and mid-2025, and that the company has invested in more than 30 robotics-related upstream and downstream firms covering delivery, service, cleaning, and medical robots.[25]
Key 2024 and 2025 robotics deals include:
Meituan's broader pipeline also covers companies in joint actuator design, motion control, manipulation, and warehouse automation, signalling an intent to position itself within the coming generation of physical-AI systems.
Meituan's overseas brand Keeta launched in Hong Kong in May 2023 with an initial pilot in Mong Kok and Tai Kok Tsui. By the first quarter of 2024 Keeta had become the largest food-delivery service in Hong Kong by order volume, with roughly 43 percent market share and surpassing Foodpanda. In September 2024 Keeta launched in Al Kharj, Saudi Arabia, followed a month later by Riyadh, with a publicly announced 266 million U.S. dollar (1 billion riyal) investment commitment. Keeta has since expanded to the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Qatar, with plans to enter Bahrain and Oman to cover all six Gulf Cooperation Council states.[27][28]
Keeta's overseas operations also serve as the launch vehicle for Meituan's international drone and AI products. Keeta Air Delivery operates the Hong Kong and Dubai drone routes described above, and Keeta has indicated it plans to bring elements of the LongCat and Xiaomei stack into its overseas storefronts as the AI agent matures.
Meituan reported full-year 2024 revenue of 337.6 billion yuan, up 22 percent year on year, and adjusted net profit of 35.8 billion yuan, up 158 percent. Core Local Commerce revenue grew 20.2 percent, driven by delivery services, in-store dining, and online marketing. The New Initiatives segment grew 28.9 percent and significantly narrowed its losses, helped by Keeta's traction in Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia. In the third quarter of 2024 alone, Meituan reported quarterly revenue of 93.6 billion yuan, up 22.4 percent year on year, with adjusted net profit up 124 percent to 12.2 billion yuan.[1][2]
Wang Xing told investors during the 2024 results call that the company would step up AI capital expenditure in 2025 to defend Meituan's lead in local commerce against new competitive pressure from JD.com and Alibaba's Ele.me, both of which entered or expanded their food delivery offerings during 2024 and 2025 with multibillion-yuan subsidy programs.[1]
| Product | Type | First Released | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| LongCat-Flash | Open-weight Mixture-of-Experts large language model | September 2025 | 560B total / 27B average active parameters; MIT License |
| LongCat-Flash-Thinking | Open-weight reasoning model | September 2025 | Chain-of-thought variant of LongCat-Flash |
| LongCat-Flash-Lite | Open-weight efficient LLM | 2025 | 68.5B total / 2.9 to 4.5B active parameters |
| LongCat-Flash-Omni | Open-weight omni-modal model | Late 2025 | Real-time audio and visual interaction |
| LongCat-Video | Open-weight long-form video generator | October 2025 | Long video generation focus |
| LongCat-Image | Open-weight image generation model | December 2025 | Approximately 6B parameters |
| Xiaomei | Consumer voice AI agent | September 2025 | Voice-driven food delivery, restaurant booking, hotel booking |
| Wow | Consumer generative AI social app | November 2023 | Early experiment in AI personalities |
| Miaoshua | Consumer image generation app | 2024 | Stand-alone image creation product |
| Real-time dispatch system | Internal operations research and ML system | 2019 | Reduced average delivery time by 20.96 percent |
| Vision AI platform | Internal computer vision stack | Pre-2020 | Used for merchant onboarding, identity verification, food safety |
Meituan's drone and ADV programs are widely cited as the most operationally mature in China and among the most advanced in the world. The MIT Technology Review described Shenzhen's Meituan-served drone deliveries as routine daily life rather than a futuristic novelty.[16] The Wire China noted that, as of 2025, Chinese ADV fleets including Meituan's were significantly outpacing full robotaxis in serving real customers, in part because slow curb robots face fewer regulatory hurdles than passenger vehicles.[21] The intensifying food-delivery price war with Alibaba's Ele.me and JD.com placed Meituan's core economics under sustained pressure during 2024 and 2025, and the LongCat program plus Xiaomei agent are central to Wang Xing's stated "offensive" AI posture.[1][13]