Forrest Li

Singapore, games and e-commerce. Li founded Garena in 2009 to publish online games in Southeast Asia, then used the cash from its hit Free Fire, designed to run on cheap phones, to fund Shopee, launched in 2015, and the payments arm SeaMoney. Games paying for a loss-making marketplace until it reached scale is an unusual cross-subsidy, and Shopee became the region's leading online shop.