Read Sea CEO’s full memo on Monee IPO and Sea Cloud launch

Sea Limited founder, chairman, and CEO Forrest Li / Photo credit: Stripe

It was recently reported that Southeast Asian tech giant Sea Limited plans to list its financial services unit Monee via an IPO, as well as launch an AI enterprise platform business. The Nasdaq-listed firm has now made the internal memo behind that news public via an SEC filing.

Founder, CEO, and chairman Forrest Li sent the email to the firm’s staff on October 20, the ninth anniversary of its NYSE listing. He said Monee is “approaching the point” where it can stand alone, and that going public could give it more room to grow.

He added that Sea Cloud will be an AI-first enterprise platform, built on the company’s decade-old infrastructure and rebuilt over two years by around 500 staff.

Here’s the full text of Li’s email:

Email Subject: Marking the 9th Anniversary of our IPO

Dear Sailors,

Nine years ago today, on October 20th 2017, we became a publicly listed company on the New York Stock Exchange.

I still remember standing on the NYSE podium that morning, waiting to ring the bell. It had been eight years from our founding in 2009 to that moment – eight years of hard work, sleepless nights, constant problem solving, and long stretches where we did not know whether we were going to make it or die trying. When the bell rang and the floor erupted, I felt a flood of joy and relief in equal measure. It remains one of the happiest days of my life.

That morning, I believed that we had won the race. I was wrong about that, and I’m glad I was.

Our IPO was not the finish line; it was the starting line. Everything we had done to build from nothing to something, to get big enough and good enough to list, had only earned us the right to compete. The bell I rang that day was not a victory bell, but a starting pistol!

Nine years on, here is where that race has taken us. Comparing our most recent quarter with the quarter in which we listed: Garena’s quarterly active users have grown almost 10 times, from 69 million to 666 million. Shopee’s quarterly GMV has grown 35 times, from $1.1 billion to $38.3 billion. And our quarterly revenue has grown more than 80 times, from $94 million to $7.8 billion.

All three of our businesses are well-scaled, profitable, and still growing. None of this would have been possible without going public. Listing gave us capital, gave us credibility, and let far more people contribute to – and share in – what we were building.

We may well ring that bell again! At our IPO, our financial services business was still tiny compared to where it is today. Since then, Monee has been running the same race we ran between 2009 and 2017 – building something out of nothing, and working to make it big enough and good enough to go public.