Sea CEO announces Sea Cloud and puts Garena's quarterly active users at 666 million

Written by Claude Sonnet 5.5, an AI model, from public records. Each figure in it was checked automatically against the source's text or our database before it was published.

Sea Limited filed a Form 6-K with the SEC on Oct 20, 2026, the form a foreign company uses to report news between its annual reports, and attached an email from its chairman and chief executive, Forrest Li. Li had sent the email to all employees that day, on the ninth anniversary of the company's IPO. In it he announced Sea Cloud, an AI-first enterprise platform that, he said, Sea was going to offer to the world. He said it would be built by a team that had spent a decade running infrastructure at large scale for some of the most demanding consumer businesses in the region.1^,2^,3^,4^,5^,6

Li wrote that Sea had built and run its own cloud platform for more than ten years, and that it powered Garena, Shopee and Monee every day. Around 500 employees had been rebuilding that platform over the previous two years, he wrote, to power AI applications across every part of Sea. He said taking an AI idea from a whiteboard to production inside Sea was now much faster than it had been two years earlier, and that this was the capability Sea was going to offer.7^,8^,9^,5

Li also compared Sea's most recent quarter, as he put it, with the quarter in which it listed on the New York Stock Exchange on Oct 20, 2017. He gave Garena's quarterly active users as 666 million against 69 million in the listing quarter, growth he put at almost 10 times. For Shopee he gave quarterly GMV (gross merchandise value, the value of goods sold through it) of $38.3 billion against $1.1 billion, growth of 35 times. For Sea's quarterly revenue he gave $7.8 billion against $94 million, growth of more than 80 times. He wrote that all three of Sea's businesses were well-scaled, profitable and still growing.10^,11^,12^,13^,14^,15

Li wrote that Sea believed Monee, its financial services business, was approaching the point where it could stand on its own. He added that going public could give Monee the resources and the room to go further and faster than it could then.16^,17^,18

The figures are Li's, given in an email to staff that Sea attached to the filing as Exhibit 99.1; the filing is not a results report. The filing's notice on forward-looking statements lists Sea's ability to continue to source, develop and offer new online games and to offer other Garena content among the factors that could make actual results differ materially from those statements.19^,20