Editor’s note: TNGlobal was invited by Stripe to cover Stripe Tour Singapore.
Speaking at Stripe Tour Singapore in a fireside chat with Stripe Chief Revenue Officer Tyler Bryson, Sea Ltd Founder, Chairman and CEO Forrest Li reflected on Sea’s journey, from its early days selling prepaid gaming cards to the expansion of Shopee and other businesses, as well as the company’s growing use of artificial intelligence.
Li said Southeast Asia’s diversity means companies cannot simply transplant a successful business model from another market and expect it to work across the region.
“It’s also a very fragmented market and you cannot just think about all Southeast Asia as one market,” Li said.
For Sea, the answer has been to develop “bottom-up” solutions tailored to the conditions of individual markets.
From gaming to payments
Li founded Sea, then known as Garena, in 2009 after identifying a gap between Southeast Asia’s large and passionate gaming community and the gaming industry’s limited ability to monetize the region.
Li, who described himself as a longtime gamer, said gaming was already deeply embedded in Southeast Asian culture when Sea was founded. Yet international game companies did not see the region as a compelling commercial market.
One of the biggest obstacles was payments, he noted.
At the time, many gamers were teenagers without credit cards, making it difficult for them to purchase games and access their full functionality.
Sea responded by developing its own prepaid cards and distributing them through convenience stores and cybercafes. Li recalled that the company’s early office in Singapore was partly used as a warehouse for the cards, while employees delivered them directly to cybercafes.
The solution helped unlock a market that already had demand but lacked the infrastructure to convert that demand into revenue.
“It’s interesting, like we were very much into the game, but end up a payment thing became a critical breakthrough for us in the early days,” Li said.
The experience also shaped the company’s approach to future businesses: rather than starting with a predetermined playbook, Sea looked for specific problems that needed to be solved.
Keeping a startup mentality at scale
That approach continued as Sea expanded beyond gaming into e-commerce and financial services. Li said the company has worked to preserve an entrepreneurial culture even as it has grown to around 60,000 employees.
Sea recruits young talent through its Global Management Associate Program, which places graduates in a two-year rotation across different parts of the business and markets.
Li said his message to new employees is straightforward. “Remember you are joining a startup. You are not joining a big company.”
To him, entrepreneurship is also less about the image of being a founder and more about identifying concrete problems.
“When we started the e-commerce business, how come a game company can start an e-commerce business?” he said. “But actually, there’s no such e-commerce marketplace platform in Southeast Asia,” he said.
The opportunity was to address a gap that had already been solved in markets such as the US and China but remained largely open in Southeast Asia, he added.
Why Southeast Asia requires localization
Li also pointed out that one of the biggest misconceptions about Southeast Asia is treating the region as a single market.
Singapore and Vietnam, for example, may be only a few hours apart by air, but differ substantially in economic development, lifestyles and consumer behavior.
Sea therefore adopted a market-by-market approach. Li pointed to Indonesia as an early example. When Shopee launched there, consumers could place orders through their phones but often could not make payments online. Instead, buyers had to take a payment code to an ATM or bank branch.
To address the problem of identifying individual payments, Shopee developed a workaround in which similar products were offered at slightly different prices, allowing the company to identify which customer had made a particular payment.
“It’s not in some playbook from the United States,” Li said. “This is the type of localization — solve problems.”
Brazil offered another example of the same philosophy.
After Sea’s Free Fire game gained popularity in Brazil, Li and his leadership team visited the country in 2019. They found that e-commerce penetration was relatively low despite the market’s size.
The problem, they concluded, was partly logistics. Delivery costs were high enough to make it difficult to sell lower-priced goods economically.
Sea saw an opportunity to apply the logistics expertise it had accumulated in Southeast Asia to the Brazilian market.
For Li, the lesson was consistent: understand the local constraint first, then determine whether the company’s existing capabilities can solve it.
Financial services as a natural extension
Sea’s financial services business followed a similar path. For instance, Shopee Pay initially emerged from the need to make e-commerce payments easier in markets where traditional payment infrastructure was less accessible. Over time, Sea expanded into credit and lending.
Li said the company observed purchasing patterns around consumers’ pay cycles and recognized that limited access to credit was restricting purchases.
In markets such as Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines, credit-card penetration remains significantly lower than in many Western markets, creating demand for alternative forms of consumer credit, he noticed.
Sea initially offered credit to consumers purchasing on Shopee before expanding the service beyond the platform.
Li said Sea’s lending business now has a loan book of more than $10 billion, with about 50 million people having outstanding credit.
The expansion is also creating a closer relationship between Sea’s commerce and financial-services businesses.
At Stripe Tour Singapore, the companies announced that ShopeePay and SPayLater would become available on the Stripe business network across Southeast Asia by the end of 2026, according to the discussion.
AI moves from experimentation to execution
Artificial intelligence is now becoming another area where Sea is applying the same focus on practical problems.
Li highlighted customer service as one of the clearest examples. Sea handles millions of orders, creating a large volume of customer inquiries.
According to Li, more than 80 percent of customer inquiries are now handled entirely by AI, with customer satisfaction in its tests exceeding that of human customer-service interactions.
He said Sea uses A/B testing before rolling out AI-powered services, emphasizing that the goal is not simply to reduce costs but to ensure that customers are satisfied.
AI is also changing how Sea develops games. Li said generative AI is increasingly being used to produce artwork and concepts that previously required significant amounts of outsourced work. Senior artists can then focus on final refinement.
For Free Fire, which Li said is played by more than 100 million people globally each day, AI is also being used to improve the gaming experience.
Many new players historically played against bots designed to help them learn the game before competing against more experienced players. Li said AI has made those bots substantially more sophisticated. Sea is also using AI to encourage more social interaction within the game by pairing solo players with AI-powered bots in team-based play.
‘Never give up’
Beyond business strategy, Li said persistence has been one of the defining characteristics of his entrepreneurial journey.
Looking back, he said Sea experienced multiple periods when the future appeared uncertain and many factors were outside the company’s control. But he said there was never a moment when he seriously considered giving up.
“As long as you have that aspiration, you have that conviction yourself, whatever the challenge in your face, there’s always a way,” Li said.
His advice to entrepreneurs was therefore less about a particular business formula and more about maintaining the conviction to continue adapting.
“Trust yourself, believe yourself and never, never give up,” he said.
At the same time, Li stressed the importance of staying humble and adaptive — principles that he said are embedded in Sea’s culture alongside serving customers, taking action and committing to the company’s goals.
Sea operates three core businesses across digital entertainment, e-commerce, as well as digital payments and financial services, known as Garena, Shopee and Monee, respectively. Garena is a global online games developer and publisher.
Shopee is the largest pan-regional e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, and is a leading platform in Brazil. Monee is a leading digital payments and financial services provider in Southeast Asia, with a growing presence in Latin America, information from Sea’s website showed.
Headquartered in Singapore and listed on New York Stock Exchange, Sea’s shares closed at $97.36 on Sept. 30, giving the technology group a market capitalisation of more than $69.6 billion.
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