Meituan Buys its Co-founder Wang Huiwen’s AI Venture Light Year for 2.065 Billion Yuan

Credit: Visual China

BEIJING, June 30 (TiPost) -- In a filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Thursday, Meituan announced that it will be fully acquiring Guangnian Zhi Wai, or Light Year for 2.065 billion yuan, including $234 million in cash from outside of China, 367 million yuan in debt in the form of domestic convertible bond, and 1 yuan to Wang Huiwen, the founder of Light Year and co-founder of Meituan.

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The $234 million includes $5 million from Meituan’s CEO Wang Xing, $28 million from Sequoia China, and approximately $200 million from other investors.

The domestic equity of Light Year is wholly owned by Wang Huiwen with an unaudited book value of 340 million yuan while the company completed its overseas Series-A funding in May 2023. Currently, 76.72% equity of Light Year belongs to Wang Huiwen"s holding company AI Age, 2.44% to Sequoia China, 0.43% to Qimai, an investment company owned by Wang Xing, and 20.41% to other investors.

The main asset of Light Year is its stake in OneFlow Technology, an AI architecture startup. According to the filing, the book value of OneFlow Technology was 15 million yuan as of the end of 2022. Light Year holds 46.52%  

of its shares and Yuan Jinhui, the founder of OneFlow Technology, holds a 34.63% stake.

According to the filing, Light Year had net cash of around $285 million as of June 29.

Meituan will control 100% of Light Year after the completion of the deal.

Meituan said that after the acquisition, it will support Light Year to continue

its exploration and research in the field of large models.

In November 2022, U.S. technology company OpenAI released ChatGPT, an AI chatbot, inspiring many followers and challengers around the world, including

China. In February this year, Wang Huiwen issued a series of recruitment posts on several social media outlets, saying he planned to personally invest $50 million for 25% shares in "OpenAI for China"-- Light Year, aiming to recruit R&D talents in the industry.  

In late March, Beijing-based Light Year acquired large language model developer OneFlow, whose market value is estimated to be 500 million yuan.  Wang Huiwen said in an interview with Caixin that the main partners of OpenAI were already in place, and that the company was continuing to recruit talents on large models, algorithms and applications.　　

It seems that Wang Huiwen was set to dedicate more time and effort to the new project. On March 24, Meituan announced that Wang would be transitioning from his role as an executive director to a non-executive director.

Meituan announced on Sunday that Wang Huiwen was resigning from all

his corporate positions at the food delivery giant due to health reasons.

On May 25, Wang Xing said at Meituan"s 2023 first-quarter earnings meeting that the company are developing its own basic big model and related applications, but there"s nothing to show yet.

Wang Xing also said AI will change everything and bring greater opportunities than the iPhone and the Internet. Meituan has already invested in the robotics industry through self-research or investment in the past four years, and AI will make robots even smarter.

The financial report shows that Meituan achieved its first-quarter revenue of 58.617 billion yuan, an increase of 26.7% year-on-year, exceeding market expectations of 57.48 billion yuan. The net profit was 3.358 billion yuan, compared with a net loss of 5.702 billion yuan in the same period of the previous year. The adjusted net income was 5.491 billion yuan, compared with an adjusted net loss of 3.586 billion yuan in the same period last year.

(The exchange rate: One U.S. dollar equals 7.2 yuan.)

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