Southeast Asia’s largest internet and mobile platform company, Garena Interactive, announced the successful closing of its USD 170 million Series D funding round. The round was led by Khazanah Nasional Berhad (“Khazanah”), the strategic investment fund of the Government of Malaysia.
“We are proud to welcome Khazanah as a shareholder in Garena,” said Garena’s founder,
Chairman and Group CEO, Forrest Li. “Khazanah’s experience in building leading businesses
will help us strengthen our leadership position across our digital content, ecommerce, and
payment platforms and advance our global mission of ‘connecting the dots.’”
Founded in 2009, Garena has achieved compound annual revenue growth of more than 90% over the past five years to over USD 300 million of gross revenue in 2015. Today, Garena is the market leader in interactive digital content in Greater Southeast Asia and has strategically built on that position of strength to launch two complementary consumer offerings: Shopee, a mobile-centric online marketplace; and AirPay, a payments platform tailored to the unique market needs of the region’s consumers.
“Shopee is the fastest growing ecommerce business the region has ever seen and is among
the fastest growing in the world,” said Group President Nicholas A. Nash. “Likewise, AirPay is the fastest growing digital payments business in the region’s history and is tightly integrated with our content and ecommerce operations. These growth trajectories highlight the potential of a unified platform to serve the hundreds of millions of internet and mobile users in our region while bringing shared value to our content partners, marketplace sellers, and payment partners.”
“With this new round of capital, we have no doubt that Shopee and AirPay will be the leading offerings in the market,” said Li. Khazanah is joining an exceptional international team of existing financial investors in Garena including General Atlantic LLC, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and Keytone Ventures.
Garena represented the first Southeast Asia internet investment for each of these firms. In
total, Garena has now raised over USD 500 million from investors to support its growth.
Garena’s digital content platform brings highly interactive and language localized
content to over 45 million users. Consumers engage with the Garena platform and its
associated content partners for over 1.6 billion hours a month. Garena is by far the largest
beneficiary in Greater Southeast Asia of the trend toward digital content competitions, or
‘eSports’, a fundamentally new category of entertainment globally. In parallel, mobile has been a key driver of growth and contributed more than 20% of the digital content platform’s revenues in January 2016.
Source: Garena
