The investment focus is on consumer staples and concentrated bets on market leaders.
Meituan has become a strategic investor adept at catching major trends.
On June 1st, management disclosed that a single investment in a portfolio company contributed a fair value gain of 7.6 billion yuan in the quarter; on the same day, another heavily backed company, Unitree Robotics, successfully passed its listing review.
Under Wang Xing's direction, Meituan Longzhu Capital, alongside the corporate strategic investment department, has become one of the two core vehicles for the company's industrial investments.
Meituan-W (HKEX: 3690)
In early May, Meituan Longzhu led a new funding round for Moonshot AI, with the total round size reaching approximately $2 billion.
It had also led a funding round for the company in 2023. At that time, Moonshot AI's valuation was around $600 million, while its latest valuation has soared to $20 billion.
The bet on Moonshot AI represents a significant deployment of Meituan Longzhu's "era-defining category" methodology within the current AI cycle, offering a glimpse into the evolution of Wang Xing's personal investment logic.
Leading Investments Twice
There is nothing accidental about Wang Xing and Meituan Longzhu making two major bets on Moonshot AI.
Before the Spring Festival in 2023, Meituan Longzhu's AI investment team frequently discussed Yang Zhilin, debating whether to support his venture.
During the investment process, the Longzhu team engaged with Moonshot AI's co-founders, shared their understanding of the large language model field, and even assisted in recruiting for the startup.
In May 2023, as Moonshot AI was nearing the completion of its angel round, Wang Xinyu, a partner at Meituan Longzhu, met Yang Zhilin in person for the first time.
Following that meeting, Meituan Longzhu swiftly moved to invest, becoming the lead investor in Moonshot AI's A1 funding round in July of that year.
Wang Xinyu later summarized that the courage to make an early-stage bet stemmed primarily from the Moonshot team's "first-principles" understanding of the essence of large models, their high talent density, and the founder's authenticity and technical foresight.
Today, investors are more focused on whether models can be applied to real-world scenarios, converting token consumption into tangible revenue.
The Moonshot team began adjusting its direction, shifting from generalized product attempts towards coding and AI agents, from large-scale marketing towards core model capability development, and from closed-source to open-source approaches, achieving phased progress in subscription and API revenue.
Wang Xinyu revealed in an interview that Moonshot AI's annual recurring revenue surpassed $100 million by early March 2026 and exceeded $200 million in April, with both paid subscriptions and API calls accelerating.
For investors, the focus on Moonshot's Kimi is shifting from user growth and product buzz to three practical questions: whether its model capabilities can maintain a leading edge, whether its agent products can achieve genuine user adoption, and whether subscription and API revenue can continue to grow.
After the Moonshot team completed its phased validation in technology, product, and commercialization, Longzhu chose to place another bet.
For Meituan Longzhu, Moonshot AI is not just a "leading large model startup," but a company that could occupy a significant position in the era of AI productivity tools and agents.
Concentrated Bets on Market Leaders
By the beginning of this year, Meituan Longzhu's cumulative assets under management had exceeded 13 billion yuan.
Initially, it had a distinct consumer industry focus.
In 2017, Meituan-Dianping announced the establishment of the Meituan-Dianping Industry Fund, with Meituan-Dianping as the cornerstone investor, focusing on investments in the broader consumption sector. The fund was later renamed Longzhu Capital.
In 2018, it invested in Heytea; in 2019, it led a major funding round for Gu Ming; in 2020, it was one of the lead investors in the sole pre-IPO external funding round for Mixue Bingcheng.
Additionally, consumer companies like Manner Coffee, Adopt A Cow, and Xueji Fried Snacks were incorporated into its investment portfolio.
In these projects, Meituan Longzhu demonstrated a distinct style: focusing on large market segments, making concentrated bets on leading companies, and providing long-term support for their growth.
The tea beverage sector is the most typical example.
Longzhu did not invest in just one tea brand; instead, based on price segments, market capacity, chain operation capabilities, and generational shifts in consumers, it placed bets on Heytea, Gu Ming, and Mixue Bingcheng respectively.
Li Auto became a key turning point for Meituan Longzhu's transition from consumer to technology investments.
In 2019, Meituan Longzhu invested $15 million in Li Auto's Series C round, while Wang Xing personally invested $285 million. Years later, Li Auto founder Li Xiang became emotional in an interview, calling Wang Xing the "greatest benefactor" on his entrepreneurial journey.
In July 2020, Li Auto listed on the NASDAQ, becoming the first IPO exit for Meituan Longzhu.
"Li Auto was our fund's first investment at the intersection of consumption and technology," Wang Xinyu summarized.
Within Meituan Longzhu's investment framework, consumption and technology are not strictly separate. Good technology products ultimately serve consumers; categories that genuinely change consumer lifestyles often become new opportunities at the convergence of technology and industry.
In 2021, Longzhu established a technology investment team, focusing primarily on electrification and intelligence, with attention on AI, robotics, semiconductors, electric vehicles, new energy, and new materials.
AI became a major focus for Meituan Longzhu precisely because it fits the definition of an "era-defining category."
Wang Xinyu has stated that Longzhu pursues "the next great enterprise in its non-consensus stage," hoping to identify and pursue what could be the most valuable company of the future as early as possible. It was within this logic that Moonshot AI entered Longzhu's view.
Currently, Longzhu's technology investment map is clear:
In the AI large model space, there is Moonshot AI; in embodied intelligence and robotics, there are Unitree Robotics, Galaxy General, Xinghai Tu, Independent Variable, and Digua Robotics; the semiconductors and hard tech field includes projects like Qingchun Semiconductor and Lingming Photonics.
Generational Shifts
From Heytea to Li Auto, from Unitree Robotics to Moonshot AI, what Meituan Longzhu continues is not a specific industry label, but a relatively stable methodology:
Identifying sufficiently large categories and exceptionally strong entrepreneurs within generational shifts, and providing concentrated support at critical inflection points.
Meituan Longzhu is positioned as a market-oriented venture capital firm, while Meituan also invests through its corporate strategic investment system; the two are not entirely equivalent. In many technology projects, observers pay attention to their potential synergy with Meituan's core business.
From this perspective, the potential for Moonshot AI within the Meituan ecosystem can be envisioned in at least three layers: first, as a consumer decision-making entry point; second, as an AI agent for merchants; third, for improving service industry efficiency. This also explains why Meituan Longzhu continues to make concentrated bets on embodied intelligence and robotics beyond AI.
Wang Xinyu has publicly stated that one answer for the next era is embodied intelligence, and another is new AI-driven hardware terminals.
Longzhu's investments in projects like Unitree Robotics, Galaxy General, Xinghai Tu, and Independent Variable can be understood as bets on AI moving from the digital world into the physical world.
Projects like Heytea, Gu Ming, Mixue Bingcheng, Manner, and Xueji Fried Snacks formed its earliest market-recognized portfolio. Projects like Li Auto, Moonshot AI, and Unitree Robotics have revealed another, clearer technology investment theme to the outside world.
Meituan Longzhu has also ventured into the healthcare direction, with investments in companies like Zhiran Medical and Anlingke Biotech. This indicates that its boundaries are still expanding.
Meituan Longzhu is charting a path for the growth of an independent venture capital institution with an industrial background: starting as an industrial capital arm, gradually moving beyond the operational scope of the parent company, and seeking opportunities within larger technology and industrial cycles.
For Longzhu, what matters is not labeling itself as a consumer, technology, or industrial capital firm, but rather identifying, as early as possible in each era shift, the category and enterprise capable of defining the future.
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