(Yicai Global) July 21 -- Takeout delivery giant Meituan has reportedly invested in Zhipu AI, a Chinese rival of ChatGPT, raising the startup’s valuation to nearly USD500 million.

Meituan Strategic Investment committed hundreds of millions of Chinese yuan, equal to tens of thousands of US dollars, to Zhipu AI’s Series B2 fundraiser a few months ago, 36Kr reported yesterday.

Zhipu AI’s algorithm has performed well in optimizing Meituan’s advertising algorithm, 36Kr noted, citing a source familiar with the matter. Its investment in the Beijing-based large language model startup marks the rapid shift to the practical application of LLMs from research and development.

Founded in 2019 by Tang Jie, a computer science professor at Tsinghua University, Zhipu AI secured CNY100 million (USD14 million) in a Series B funding round led by Legend Capital and Qiming Venture Capital last September. 

Zhipu AI launched GLM-130B, an ultra-large pre-training system that can handle both the Chinese and English languages, last August. In November, the Stanford Large Model Center evaluated 30 major LLMs worldwide and selected GLM-130B as the only Asian representative.

GLM-130B performs similarly or better than large models from OpenAI and Google Brain on key indicators and has been requested by over 1,000 institutions from 70 countries worldwide, the results of the evaluation showed.

The core members of Zhipu AI’s team have also been involved in the development of Wudao, an LLM developed by Tsinghua University and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.

Zhipu AI is not the only LLM firm in which Meituan has an interest. Last month, it acquired Light Year, an artificial general intelligence startup set up in February by Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen, for nearly CNY2.1 billion (USD293 million). Wang resigned as Meituan’s vice president for health reasons in 2020.

Editor: Futura Costaglione