Meituan Joins AI Race by Buying Co-Founder’s Months-Old Firm
- Wang Huiwen founded Light Year mere months before the deal
- Deal gets the food-delivery giant into the ChatGPT clone race
A Meituan advertisement inside a subway station in Beijing.
Photographer: Yan Cong/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Meituan is buying a co-founder’s generative AI startup for almost $234 million, a deal that gets the food-delivery giant into a Chinese race to develop ChatGPT-like services.
Meituan agreed to pay that amount in cash while also assuming Light Year’s roughly 367 million yuan ($51 million) of liabilities, according to a stock exchange filing. The Chinese company will inherit about $285 million of cash.