UPDATED 01:44 EST / JANUARY 21 2016

NEWS

China’s Meituan-Dianping scores $3bn in tech’s biggest-ever funding round

A Chinese firm that hawks movie tickets and restaurant bookings among other things has just become the recipient of what it claims is the single largest non-IPO funding round ever raised in the tech industry.

Meituan-Dianping, which The Wall Street Journal describes as an online-to-offline (O2O) provider whose products are somewhat similar to the group-buying and restaurant-booking services sold by Groupon Inc. and Yelp Inc., raised a massive $3.3 billion in the round, putting its valuation at a staggering $18 billion.

Chinese investment firm Tencent Holdings Limited led the round, which also saw the participation of DST Global, TBP Capital, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Baillie Gifford, CDB Kai Yuan Capital Management; Capital Today; and Temasek Holdings. The round sees Meituan-Dianping rise to fifth place in CrunchBase’s unicorn leaderboard, trailing behind Uber Technologies Inc., Xiaomi Inc., Airbnb Inc. and Palantir Technologies Inc.

Meituan-Dianping came into existence in October of last year following a merger between two of China’s biggest O2O businesses, Meituan and Dianping, which still operate as separate brands. The company claimed to have raked in $25.84 billion in gross merchandise volume last year, and says it has 150 million active users who place around 10 million daily orders between them.

China was once home to thousands of Groupon clones that tried to replicate the U.S. firm’s success in Chinese markets, but Meituan and Dianping came out on top thanks to the backing of some of the country’s biggest Internet firms. Dianping was lucky enough to earn the early backing of Tencent, while Meituan secured investment from Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Limited.

Interestingly, while Groupon’s fortunes have been in decline for some time now (yes it is still going, just about), the two Chinese clones went from strength to strength by widening the scope of their offerings to include things like travel reservations, ticket bookings for restaurants, shows, and events, wedding services, taxi cabs and more.

Meituan-Dianping is seen as the leader of China’s “O2O market”, which is generally a catch-all term for the sale of products online that were traditionally only sold in brick-and-mortar stores. The market was worth $48 billion in 2015 according to China’s State Council, which goes some way to explaining why investors were falling over themselves to throw money at.

Image credit: TaniaVdB via pixabay.com

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