BEIJING—China’s burgeoning middle class, which increasingly is going online for everything from ordering lunch to booking hotel rooms, is fueling expectations that an 8-year-old startup with an innovative smartphone app will go public at a lofty $60 billion valuation this year.

Meituan-Dianping defies easy comparison to a like company in the U.S., instead providing a range of services—vouchers like Groupon Inc., reviews in the style of Yelp Inc., food delivery similar to Grubhub Inc. and travel services akin to those provided by Kayak Software Group’s namesake travel site.

Few U.S. or Chinese firms offer the same breadth of services as Meituan does, and it hopes to carve a spot for itself among Chinese internet giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. , Baidu Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd.

The Beijing-based company, backed by social-media giant Tencent, has an app used by more than 320 million people to buy cinema tickets, book lifestyle services or get restaurant recommendations.

“We are talking about eating, traveling and all the local services,” said Neil Shen, founding partner of Sequoia Capital China, one of Meituan’s backers. “This is a $1 trillion sector. If you are a dominant player, you are definitely worth a lot.”

Valued at about $30 billion, Meituan sits between home-rental site Airbnb Inc. and Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. on the list of world’s most valuable startups, according to the most recent rankings by The Wall Street Journal. It’s aiming for an initial public offering in Hong Kong in the coming months, people familiar with the matter say, with a target valuation topping $60 billion.

Founded in 2010, Meituan faces lots of competition. Alibaba is expanding its services business through Koubei, a joint venture with its Ant Financial Services Group affiliate. Meituan is also second to Alibaba’s wholly owned Ele.me unit in food delivery, according to industry researcher Analysys International, with a 42% market share to compared to 51% for Ele.me. Meituan said Analysys data did not fully account for food deliveries initiated across all of Meituan-Dianping’s apps, and understated the company’s market share.

The company’s up-and-comer cred was cemented six months ago when Apple Inc. chief executive Tim Cook ate dumplings at a Shanghai restaurant with Meituan founder Wang Xing, who taught him how to order and pay with his smartphone. Mr. Cook posted a photo on his Chinese social media account, saying he was seeing some “great innovation” on the trip.

Mr. Wang, 39, graduated from Beijing’s Tsinghua University with a degree in radio technology and information systems. Fluent in English, he dropped out from a Ph.D. program at the University of Delaware to become an entrepreneur—first with a social media knockoff of Facebook , which he eventually sold to a local competitor, and later with a Chinese version of Twitter .

That business was shut down by authorities in 2009 following ethnic unrest in the Xinjiang region, which state media blamed in part on social media.

Meituan still operates at a loss, the people familiar say, thanks in part to the street fight with Ele.me. Both firms offer discounts to attract and retain customers, and while Ele.me is valued at about one-third of Meituan, Alibaba’s deep pockets mean there is always a threat the subsidy war could escalate.

“Chinese consumers are extremely price-sensitive,” said Steven Zhu, an analyst at Pacific Epoch in Shanghai. “The risk is when Meituan stops offering subsidies, customers will jump to its competitors.”

Di Youquan, a 27-year-old civil engineer in Beijing, says he started using the Meituan app to order lunch and now uses Meituan’s 1.3 billion user reviews to check out restaurant reviews and buy movie tickets. He also used the app to find a tattoo parlor and a bridal photography studio.

“These are all real people who have visited these places and written reviews,” said Mr. Di. “It saves me the hassle of asking around for recommended places.”

Alibaba was once an investor in Meituan, but sold its stake after Meituan acquired delivery service Dianping—backed by rival Tencent—in 2015. Tencent has put more money into the merged company, leading the most recent funding round of $4 billion last October.

Meituan is still best known for food delivery, with a fleet of half a million uniformed drivers on scooters ferrying noodles, fried rice and milk tea from restaurants to customers, their routes guided by central computers.

Along with revenue from deliveries, the company also sells ads to merchants, who get higher placement on the Meituan app during customer searches for goods and services. The company also sells consumers discount vouchers at some stores when they pay with the app, taking commissions from these sales.

Another revenue source is selling business services to Chinese merchants, such as helping them digitize payments. China’s retail sector is still dominated by small merchants who don’t always have the resources to invest in new technologies.

Meituan recently launched trial ride-hailing services in two Chinese cities, hoping to leverage its large base of active customers who have used the app at least once in the past year. That could foreshadow a costly battle with Didi Chuxing, which is backed by Japan’s SoftBank Group and Alibaba.

Mr. Wang said in an interview that there is room for competition even though the internet market is crowded.

“Being an entrepreneur, you always need to worry about a lot of things,” Mr. Wang said. “But the most important thing to worry about is whether you see real demand, and whether you know what the customer wants and whether you can meet that need.”