Garena rebrands as Sea; raises fund of $550 million

Garena, southeast Asia’s most valuable startup has been rebranded as Sea Limited after securing funding worth $550 million to take on e-commerce giants of the likes of Alibaba and other players in Indonesia. The eight-year old startup backed by Tencent Holdings bagged some new investors in its latest funding round such as GDP Ventures, led by Martin Hartano, the son of Indonesia’s richest man and JG Summit Holdings Inc, founded by Philippine billionaire John Gokongwei.

Garena, a shopping and online gaming company is trying to tap into the expanding Southeast Asian e-commerce market, particularly in Indonesia. While Alibaba group holdings has expanded its online marketplace since buying control of Lazada group SA in 2016, JD.com is said to be investing in domestic player Tokopedia to boost its business.

Garena is founded by Forrest Li, a Chinese-born entrepreneur in Singapore in 2009. Its businesses include Garena, an online games brand, Airpay, a digital payments service. The company had picked Goldman Sachs Inc  to prepare for an initial public offering, possibly in the US, that could fetch about $1 billion.

Some of the other investors in the round include Farallon Capital Management, Hillhouse Capital, Cathay Financial Holding Co and Taiwanese food conglomerate Uni-President Enterprise Corp’s investment arm. Sea plans to include majority of the new funds to expand Shopee in Indonesia. The online marketplace’s annualized gross merchandise value has more than doubled in the past nine months to more than $3 million, according to the company.

Sea declined to disclose the valuation after the latest round. While the company had raised $170 million at a valuation of $3.75 billion in 2016, and its roster of previous investors include Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd. and General Atlantic LLC. The startup has said it grew net revenue 13-fold from 2011 to about $270 million in 2015.

The developments also followed the appointment of three advisors that may prove instrumental to its Indonesian efforts: former Singapore foreign minister George Yeo, former Indonesian trade minister Mari Pangestu and Pandu Sjahrir, a director of Indonesian coal producer PT Toba Bara Sejahtra Tbk.

Source: Bloomberg