Garena rebrands to Sea and raises $550 million more to focus on Indonesian e-commerce

Garena, one of Southeast Asia’s biggest tech startups, has picked up $550 million in new funding and improved its name. The Singapore-headquartered customer Online organization instructed Bloomberg that it is now called Sea Ltd. to replicate is global expansion programs (and also since SEA is an acronym for Southeast Asia). Its new valuation was undisclosed.

Sea’s funding and rebranding arrives as it is reportedly making ready for an IPO that might raise $one billion.

The company’s previous funding was an undisclosed amount of money raised in September. Prior to that, it raised $a hundred and seventy million at a valuation of $three.75 billion in March 2016, which was sufficient to make it Southeast Asia’s most worthwhile tech startup.

The organization stated it will use its new cash to grow Shopee, its customer-to-customer marketplace, in Indonesia. As one of the greatest and quickest-escalating e-commerce markets in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has attracted a flurry of desire from e-commerce companies and traders more than the previous two several years. Most notably, Alibaba took management of Lazada in a $one billion deal previous 12 months to compete with Southeast Asian e-commerce firms like Tokopedia and MatahariMall, two of Indonesia’s greatest online marketplaces. Sea instructed Bloomberg that Shopee’s annualized gross items price has doubled more than the earlier 9 months to a lot more than $three billion.

Sea’s levels of competition with Alibaba is heightened by the reality that one of its traders is Tencent, which is one of Alibaba’s biggest rivals in China. This newest spherical introduced Sea some notable new backers, such as GDP Undertaking, JG Summit Holdings, Farallon Cash Administration, Hillhouse Cash, Cathay Money Keeping, and Taiwanese foods and retail conglomerate Uni-President Enterprises Corp.

Garena was started in 2009 as an online gaming system and its game titles organization will keep that name. Its other main products are Shopee and AirPay, an e-wallet provider. Sea also stated that it will insert previous Singaporean international minister George Yeo, previous Indonesian trade minister Mair Pangestu, and Pandu Sjahrir, a director of Indonesian coal and palm oil organization PT Toba Bara Sejahtra, as advisors.

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