Terence Lee · · 2 min readGarena raises money from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, reaches $200M in revenue
Garena, a Singapore-headquartered company in the gaming, internet, and mobile industry, has raised a new round of funding, led by The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) with participation from existing investors. The size of the round wasn’t disclosed.
OTPP, a retirement fund for teachers and one of the largest institutional investors in the world with US$140 billion in assets, has made many investments in ecommerce ventures and internet startups. It was involved in a US$300 million series D round in Chinese commerce site 360Buy (now JD.com), as well as a US$500 million round in Rocket Internet venture Dafiti.
Since starting in 2009, Garena has rapidly expanded into multiple product lines. It started off creating software that linked people up for multiplayer games, then ventured into game distribution.
In 2010, it launched a mobile social network called Garena+, and more recently unveiled a couple of chat apps (BeeTalk is one) and a payment network called AirPlay. It has even launched its own venture capital firm to invest in startups. Garena has invested in Redmart, an online supermarket in Singapore.
The company claims to have 17 million monthly active users on the PC and 11 million on mobile. Most of its users come from Southeast Asia, but it has expanded into Taiwan and Hong Kong as well. It made S$31 million (US$22 million) in revenue in 2012, growing three times from the year before, according to Garena’s financial documents. In 2014, its annual revenue reached US$200 million.
The company is said to have become the top games publisher in Southeast Asia after it received an investment from Chinese internet giant Tencent, which also gave Garena an exclusive license to distribute League of Legends in the region.
According to the Financial Times, the OTPP investment values the company at over US$2.5 billion. Garena wouldn’t confirm the valuation figure.
Update on March 3: Added more information about Garena and OTPP’s investment history.
Editing by Josh Horwitz
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