China’s Meituan gets $700M funding to take the daily deals battle to Alibaba

Meituan, one of China’s biggest startups as well as one of its top daily deals sites, revealed yesterday that it has secured US$700 million in funding.

The newest cash injection of US$700 million effectively values the Groupon-esque Meituan at US$7 billion, the company claimed in an announcement on its Weibo page (hat-tip to TechCrunch for spotting this) and at a press conference on Sunday.

This comes just eight months after Meituan attracted a US$300 million series C round from Sequoia Capital and Alibaba. However, the daily deals site did not reveal the names of its series D investors.

Meituan has fought through China’s highly fragmented daily deals industry to become the leading independent deals site, outpaced only by Alibaba’s Juhuasuan.

Meituan’s latest data, which it shared in the same Weibo post as the funding news, reveals the site now has 200 million shoppers. The startup raked in RMB 46 billion (US$7.4 billion) in revenues in 2014; it aims to raise that to RMB 100 billion (US$16.2 billion) by the end of 2015.

See: Here’s everything Alibaba invested in or acquired in 2014