Sea Plans New Cloud Business, Weighs Financial-Services Arm IPO — Update

By Kimberley Kao

Sea Ltd. is launching a new cloud business and could pursue a public listing of financial-services arm Monee, according to Chief Executive Forrest Li.

The developments come as Sea, like many other tech companies, has made artificial intelligence part of its growth strategy.

The company plans to offer an AI-first enterprise platform called Sea Cloud, Li told staff in a memo viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Built over a decade, the cloud platform has powered the company's three main businesses "at a level of cost and reliability we could not have bought from anyone else," the CEO said.

Sea rebuilt the platform to power AI applications across the organization, Li said. "Taking an AI idea from a whiteboard to production inside our company is now dramatically faster than it was two years ago," he said.

The shift comes as the company is considering listing Monee, which is nearing a position where it can operate independently, Li said in the memo. "Going public could give it the resources and the room to go further and faster than it can today," he said.

The digital-financial services arm has been the Singapore-based company's fastest-growing business in recent quarters. Sea, one of Southeast Asia's largest companies by market capitalization, also operates e-commerce platform Shopee and gaming division Garena.

Tuesday's memo marked the ninth anniversary of Sea's listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The company's shares have risen more than fivefold in that time, though the stock price remains well off its 2021 peak.

"All three of our businesses are well-scaled, profitable, and still growing. None of this would have been possible without going public," Li said.

"Listing gave us capital, gave us credibility, and let far more people contribute to--and share in--what we were building."

In the memo, Li said Sea's quarterly revenue ​has grown ​more than 80 times to $7.8 billion since listing.

In August, Sea said that Monee's second-quarter revenue jumped 59% from a year earlier to $1.4 billion. Li said then that Monee remained at an early stage of growth, with low credit penetration in the markets it operates.

Monee operates in Southeast Asia and Latin America, offering mobile ⁠wallets, payments processing, credit, and banking and insurtech services.

Write to Kimberley Kao at kimberley.kao@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 20, 2026 04:00 ET (08:00 GMT)