Singapore’s Garena rebrands as Sea, raises $550 million

GDP was joined in the funding round by Hillhouse Capital, Taiwan-based Cathay Financial Holding, Farallon Capital Management, Philippines conglomerate JG Summit Holdings, and Taiwan's President International Development Corporation, a Taiwan-headquartered retail and food company with operations across Asia.

All the investors are newcomers, aside from GDP, which took part in a funding round of undisclosed size last year with a unit of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings and Japanese impact investor Mistletoe.

Sea will use the majority of the capital to build its e-commerce platform Shopee, focusing on Indonesia and other key markets, according to a release. Shopee is one of the company’s three brands, along with online gaming platform Garena and payments platform AirPay.

The rebranding is meant to reflect an ambition to build a leading regional internet platform across multiple verticals, as opposed to the previous name which elevated the gaming segment above the other two. In adddition, Sea is an acronym for Southeast Asia that represents the company’s focus on its home region.

Sea also announced the appointment of two senior advisors – former Foreign Minister of Singapore George Yeo and former Indonesian Minister of Trade Mari Pangestu – and Pandu Sjahrir, founder and director of Indonesian coal producer Toba Bara Sejahtra, who has been named chairman of Indonesia operations.

Founded in 2009, Sea wants to become a regional internet platform for Southeast Asia similar to Google, or to China’s Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings. Its strategy was initially based on building an initial customer base through Garena, and later capitalizing on these users when introducing AirPay and Shopee.

The newest round takes the company’s capital raised to more than $1 billion. Its backers include Tencent – which has supported Sea since its Series A round – Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and General Atlantic, where Sea’s current Group President Nick Nash formerly worked as the head of the firm’s Singapore office.

Sea has also invested in several regional start-ups itself, supporting companies such as Singapore-based online grocery marketplace RedMart – since acquired by Alibaba-backed Lazada – and Vietnamese food platform Foody.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Technology
• Consumer
• Media
• Expansion
• Singapore
• TMT
• Hillhouse Capital Management
• Growth capital