Dianping

Dianping is a Chinese restaurant-review and local-services platform founded by Zhang Tao, who spent its early years building out supply-side data by manually collecting restaurant information and educating merchants to put their businesses online . By 2010, when Meituan launched its group-buying service, Dianping had already spent roughly seven years digitizing restaurant listings through a mix of B2C and limited C2C approaches—work that later proved foundational when the two companies merged . The platform also served as a training ground for technical talent: Shihai Gong joined as CTO in 2005 and over a decade scaled Dianping's engineering team from a handful of people to six hundred . Gaorong Ventures counted Dianping's founder among its LP base of successful entrepreneurs . Elsewhere's corpus does not cover the company's more recent positioning after the Meituan merger.