Sea Group: Singapore’s ‘oops’ company?

New York-listed Sea Group might be the poster child for the tech industry in Singapore right now, but the 11-year old company was overlooked in its early years.

Co-founded by Forrest Li, Gang Ye, and David Chen in 2009, Sea was a pioneer that blazed its own path. At that time, venture capital in Southeast Asia was scarce, and the tech ecosystem in Singapore didn’t take off until around 2015.

“Sea was born in an era when no one was really paying attention to tech startups in our region,” James Chan, CEO and co-founder of e-bike maker Ion Mobility, tells Tech in Asia. Chan helped formulate policies at both the Infocomm Development Authority and Infocomm Investments (now SGInnovate) in the late 2000s.

However, Sea may owe its birth to government policies and a favorable tax environment that, on the whole, encouraged businesses and entrepreneurs. Its founders and many of its early staff also landed in Singapore because of government scholarships that brought ambitious and talented people to its shores.

This migrant scrappiness contributed to Sea’s success and helped it overcome the lack of ecosystem support. The company – then called Garena – primarily distributed games at a time when private and public investors were busy courting business-to-consumer and ecommerce-related startups.

As of October 2020, Sea has 3,000 employees in Singapore across its Garena (gaming), Shopee (ecommerce), and SeaMoney divisions.

“Sea’s trajectory took a slightly different route from its peers [that were] backed through government programs,” Yinglan Tan, founder and CEO of Insignia Ventures Partners tells Tech in Asia in an email interview.

Tan’s venture capital firm focuses on investing in early-stage startups. Between 2009 and 2012, he also headed projects at the National Research Foundation (NRF), a department within the Prime Minister’s Office that develops policies and strategies for research, innovation, and enterprise.

“They did not come from an incubator or accelerator. [Instead, they] bootstrapped themselves and received most of their early money from global angels and family offices,” he adds.

See: Visualizing Sea’s rapid rise

Towards the late 2000s, programs like the Technology Incubation Scheme (TIS) and the Early Stage Venture Fund (ESVF) were rolled out by the NRF as sources of funding for capital-starved startups.

These initiatives were co-funded by the Singapore government and selected incubators and VC firms. VCs had the option to buy out government stakes later on, though they came with their own string of conditions.

Shunning VCs for “family”

Lagging behind “trend winners”

Scholarships birthed a tech giant