Who are the Singapore billionaire trio behind Sea, Southeast Asia’s largest internet firm?

The trio made it into Forbes’ 2024 list of the 50 richest people in the city-state. Li, 47, is currently the firm’s chairman and executive director while Gang Ye, 44, whose net worth is estimated at $4.8 billion, serves as its chief operating officer.

The third co-founder, David Chen, 44, is the chief product officer for Sea’s e-commerce arm, Shopee, and has $1.5 billion in wealth.

The three co-founders of Sea Limited: (from left) Forrest Li, Gang Ye, and David Chen. Photo courtesy of the company

While e-commerce is now Sea’s top business, accounting for $9 billion of its $13.4 billion revenue in 2023, the firm started out in 2009 as a gaming firm called Garena.

The trio had come to the city-state from China before that, with Chen and Ye moving there as teenagers through government scholarship programs for foreign talent while Li relocated after completing his MBA at Stanford, following his wife, according to Bloomberg.

At that time, keeping Garena operational was challenging, as Asia was still recovering from the global financial crisis.

"Basically, nobody was really looking at Southeast Asia as a promising investment opportunity," Li recalled the company’s start, as quoted by the South China Morning Post.

"We pretty much just used our own money, and some money from our family and friends. That is how we got started."

The company reached a turning point in 2010 by striking a deal to distribute games from U.S.-based Riot Games in Southeast Asia, including the popular League of Legends, and receiving backing from Chinese tech giant Tencent.

Garena began to dabble into making its own game in 2014 amid the rise of smartphone usage and improved internet access in Southeast Asia.

It also launched AirPay that year, which eventually transformed into SeaMoney, its current digital financial service arm. It expanded into e-commerce with Shopee in 2015.

These moves were a key component of Li’s vision of a company inspired by the success of other massive Chinese enterprises, according to Nick Nash, who served as Sea's group president from 2014 to 2018.

"The brilliance of Forrest’s strategy was very clear," he told Forbes, describing it as "an opportunity to locally adapt and be inspired by the two most valuable business models from China—online games from Tencent and e-commerce from Alibaba."

Garena launched its first self–developed blockbuster game, Free Fire, a couple of years after that. The game is considered to be a key driver of the firm’s success.

Li renamed the company Sea in preparation for its 2017 initial public offering, through which it raised $884 million and became listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Sea adopted "Connecting the dots" as its tagline, a phrase from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ 2005 speech.

It flourished during the Covid-19 pandemic, largely driven by Free Fire and Shopee.

Its stocks surged nearly 400% in 2020, increasing its market value to $120 billion and positioning it as the most valuable publicly traded company in the region at the time, as reported by Nikkei Asia.

Li became Singapore’s richest person on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in the following year, boasting a $22 billion fortune.

However, that figure plummeted by $17 billion during a 2022 market crash that also led to over $1 trillion in losses among the world's top 500 wealthiest individuals.

The other co-founders were also hit. Ye saw a decline of $4.3 billion in his net worth while Chen lost his billionaire status altogether.

Their fortunes have recently soared again after Sea reported its first profitable year in 2023, posting a net profit of $163 million on revenues of $13.1 billion.

Sea billionaire founder Forrest Li and his wife Liqian Ma. Photo courtesy of the Stanford Asia Economic Forum

Not much is known about Ye and Chen outside of their role in Sea. Li, meanwhile, has occasionally shared details about himself, though he is often described as "secretive and "shy."

Besides his ambitions in the digital space, Li is passionate about soccer and serves as the chairman of Lion City Sailors, a Singaporean professional football club.

A 2021 article by CNA painted him as a media-shy innovator. It quoted Sea’s former public relations head as saying: "Li is very soft-spoken and very reserved. He is typically very media shy and does not like to be in the limelight."

Last year, his wife, Liqian Ma, was said to have purchased a prestigious good class bungalow in Singapore for $31 million, while Li had previously bought the mansion adjacent to that property for $19 million, according to The Business Times.

Li has also shown an interest in the entrepreneurial community, making it a personal mission to inspire the next generation of tech founders in Southeast Asia.

"I would love to find other ways to use my own experience as an entrepreneur, and pass (it on) to the younger generations," he explained, adding that he would be happier to see more businesses in the region making their marks on the global map.