MEITUAN Dianping, a Chinese online food delivery-to-ticketing firm, has started building a mapping service, aiming to enter an area currently dominated by Alibaba’s AutoNavi and Baidu Maps.

A spokeswoman for Meituan said the company was working on the project, after it advertised more than a dozen positions on job hunting website Lagou.com on Tuesday for a new service it called “Meituan Maps.” The positions it is looking for range from data mining engineer to machine learning expert.

“We can confirm that Meituan is working on a mapping business,” the spokeswoman said.

Chinese media last month reported that Meituan had hired a former vice president at peer-to-peer second-hand car trading platform Renrenche, who was previously employed by Baidu Maps, to join the team. Meituan’s spokeswoman confirmed the hiring.

Meituan, a cross between U.S. discounting platform Groupon and online review firm Yelp, is a so-called super app offering many services such as hotel booking, movie ticketing and listings of local businesses.

It is among a breed of Chinese tech upstarts, alongside video-streaming app TikTok’s owner Bytedance and ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing, that have emerged in recent years and are threatening the dominance of Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent.

Meituan recently surpassed search giant Baidu and e-commerce giant JD.com Inc. in market capitalization.

A source familiar with the matter said that Meituan Maps was part of the firm’s location-based services platform and was aimed at improving navigation for the unit’s bike sharing, ride hailing and public transportation services.

Meituan’s spokeswoman said the location-based services platform was established in October.

AutoNavi and Baidu Maps are the two leading mapping apps in China, although others also exist. (SD-Agencies)