Forbes listed Forrest Li at $3.6 billion on 5 April 2024, 9th richest in Singapore. He arrived in Singapore after Stanford with about $100,000 in student loans and shared a rented room with his wife in Braddell.
In 2009 he founded Garena. In 2010 the company won the Southeast Asian publishing rights to League of Legends from Riot Games, and by 2014 it was valued at about $1 billion.
Shopee launched in 2015 and the company rebranded as Sea in May 2017 after raising $550 million. Sea listed on the NYSE in October 2017 and raised $6 billion in September 2021.
Profits collapsed in 2022 and Sea cut costs hard. It posted a first full-year profit of $162.7 million in 2023 and net income of $444 million on $16.8 billion of revenue in 2024.