Last Updated on October 5, 2026 by Fame Katha Editorial Team

Introduction

Forrest Li is the founder, Chairman and CEO of Sea Limited, the Singapore-based company behind Shopee, Garena and Monee.

His story did not start with billions.

Actually, it started with debt.

Li moved to Singapore after studying at Stanford. He had limited savings and a large student loan. His first startup failed. He kept going.

That second attempt became Garena.

Then came Shopee. Digital payments followed. Sea Limited eventually listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and Li became one of Singapore’s richest business figures.

His work now goes beyond technology too. He serves as President of the Football Association of Singapore and Chairman of Lion City Sailors.

Here is what is publicly known about Forrest Li, his education, career, companies, wealth and current work.

Quick Facts About Forrest Li

Fact	Details
Full Name	Forrest Xiaodong Li
Chinese Name	Li Xiaodong, 李小冬
Known As	Forrest Li
Birthplace	Tianjin, China
Age	48, according to Sea Limited’s 2026 filing
Citizenship	Singaporean
Profession	Entrepreneur and technology executive
Current Position	Founder, Chairman and CEO of Sea Limited
Major Businesses	Shopee, Garena and Monee
University	Shanghai Jiaotong University
Higher Education	MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Stanford Class	MBA ’06
Wife	Liqian Ma
Main Company	Sea Limited
Stock Ticker	NYSE: SE
Football Position	President, Football Association of Singapore
Football Club Role	Chairman, Lion City Sailors
Reported Net Worth	US$7.7 billion on Forbes’ 2026 Singapore Rich List

Who Is Forrest Li?

Forrest Li is a Singaporean technology entrepreneur born in Tianjin, China.

He is best known for building Sea Limited, one of Southeast Asia’s major internet companies.

Sea operates three main businesses.

Shopee handles e-commerce.

Garena runs digital entertainment and gaming operations.

Monee covers digital financial services.

Li has led the company since its early days.

That matters.

Many founders leave management after their companies grow. Li stayed in charge through expansion, heavy losses, falling share prices and a later return to profitability.

Forrest Li’s Early Life

Li grew up in Tianjin, a large port city in northern China.

Public details about his childhood are limited.

Reliable sources do not publicly identify his parents by name. His exact date of birth is also not clearly documented in major official profiles.

Forbes has reported that Li was an only son and that his parents spent their careers working in China’s state-sector system.

He did not come from a well-known technology or business family.

His own career developed much later.

Why Is Li Xiaodong Called Forrest Li?

His Chinese name is Li Xiaodong.

The name “Forrest” reportedly came from the movie Forrest Gump.

According to Forbes, a tutor had trouble pronouncing Xiaodong, and Li later started using Forrest as his English name.

The name stayed.

Today, Forrest Li is the name used across Sea Limited, Stanford, NUS and his other professional positions.

Forrest Li’s Education

Li earned a Bachelor of Engineering from Shanghai Jiaotong University.

Official profiles confirm the engineering degree, though they do not clearly identify a specific engineering subject.

He later made a much bigger move.

Li travelled to the United States and joined the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

He graduated with an MBA in 2006.

Stanford lists him as:

Forrest Li, MBA ’06.

That Stanford period had a major impact on what happened next.

The Stanford Years

Studying at Stanford was expensive.

Forbes reported that Li financed much of his MBA with a bank loan of roughly US$120,000.

So, he was not leaving Stanford with a giant personal fortune.

Quite the opposite.

He had debt.

He also had access to something valuable: Silicon Valley.

At Stanford, Li was surrounded by founders, technology companies, investors and people willing to take large business risks.

That environment changed the way he looked at work.

How Steve Jobs Influenced Forrest Li

One moment from Li’s Stanford years became part of his public story.

In 2005, Li attended the Stanford commencement where Steve Jobs gave his famous graduation speech.

Li was reportedly attending the graduation of his then-girlfriend, Liqian Ma.

Jobs spoke about work, failure, uncertainty and choosing a life that felt personally meaningful.

Li later pointed to the speech as an important influence.

He was already thinking about entrepreneurship.

The message pushed that thinking further.

Forrest Li’s Career Before Sea Limited

Before starting his own company, Li worked for established businesses.

Official profiles list previous employment with:

• Motorola
• Corning
• Viacom Media Networks

Forbes reported that he spent about four years working in recruitment at Motorola and later Corning in Shanghai.

That job made him think hard about his own career.

He regularly looked through other people’s résumés.

At some point, he started wondering what his own résumé would look like several years later.

The answer bothered him.

So he changed direction.

Moving to Singapore

After Stanford, Li moved to Singapore.

His future wife, Liqian Ma, was based there.

His early life in Singapore was simple.

Li later recalled arriving with little savings and a large amount of student debt.

He and his wife rented a room in a three-room HDB flat in Braddell.

There was no luxury lifestyle yet.

Not even close.

Li also spent time working with MTV Networks’ digital operations while preparing to build his own business.

Singapore later became his permanent home.

He became a naturalised Singapore citizen, though reliable public sources do not clearly state the exact date of his naturalisation.

Forrest Li’s Wife, Liqian Ma

Forrest Li is married to Liqian Ma, sometimes written as Ma Liqian.

Their relationship goes back to his Stanford years.

Stanford records identify the couple together and list Liqian Ma as MS ’05.

She was reportedly Li’s girlfriend when he attended the 2005 Stanford graduation ceremony.

They later married.

The couple generally keeps family matters private.

Reliable sources do not clearly document the number or names of their children, so those details should not be treated as confirmed facts.

Forrest Li’s First Startup Failed

This part often gets skipped.

Sea was not Li’s first business attempt.

His earlier startup was called GG Game.

It failed.

The company had focused on a single-player gaming product while the market was moving strongly toward multiplayer games.

Then the 2008 financial crisis made funding and business conditions even tougher.

Li could have stopped there.

He did not.

He told his early investors what had happened.

His direct handling of the failure helped him keep their trust.

The investors backed him again with roughly US$1 million.

That next company became Garena.

How Forrest Li Started Garena

Garena’s holding company was incorporated on May 8, 2009.

Li has served as Chairman and CEO from the company’s early days.

Garena first focused heavily on publishing and distributing online games.

Instead of trying to build every title itself, the company worked with game developers and brought their products to Southeast Asian markets.

One early deal changed Garena’s position fast.

League of Legends and Garena

Garena secured rights connected with League of Legends in Southeast Asia around 2010.

At the time, Garena was still young.

Riot Games was building League of Legends into a major global title.

The relationship gave Garena a strong product and helped the company earn credibility across the regional gaming market.

Garena expanded into countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and Taiwan.

Gaming became the base of Li’s growing business.

But he did not stop there.

From Gaming Payments to Financial Services

Payments were a real problem for Southeast Asian gaming companies.

Many users did not have credit cards.

Garena needed another way to collect payments.

The company built prepaid-card and alternative payment systems that could work across local markets.

That experience later fed into a much larger financial business.

Sea launched AirPay in Vietnam in 2014, followed by expansion into other markets.

The financial-services operation later became known as SeaMoney.

In May 2025, Sea renamed SeaMoney:

Monee.

Monee now covers services such as digital payments, credit and banking-related products in supported markets.

How Shopee Started

Sea moved into e-commerce in 2015.

That business became Shopee.

Shopee launched across seven Asian markets during June and early July 2015.

At first, the company was entering a crowded market.

There were already major e-commerce players.

Still, Shopee pushed hard into mobile commerce and localised its platform for individual markets.

It grew quickly.

Shopee later became one of the largest e-commerce platforms across Southeast Asia and Taiwan and built a major business in Brazil.

Li had gone from gaming into online shopping.

That changed Sea completely.

Why Garena Became Sea Limited

By 2017, the company was doing far more than gaming.

The Garena name no longer fitted the full business.

On April 8, 2017, Garena Interactive Holding Limited changed its corporate name to:

Sea Limited.

Garena remained the digital entertainment brand.

Sea became the parent company.

Today its main businesses are:

Garena — gaming

Shopee — e-commerce

Monee — digital financial services

Sea Limited’s NYSE IPO

Sea reached another major point in October 2017.

The company listed American Depositary Shares on the New York Stock Exchange.

Its ticker is:

SE

Trading began on October 20, 2017.

The shares were priced at US$15 each in the offering.

The IPO raised hundreds of millions of dollars and gave Sea access to much larger pools of capital.

It also pushed Forrest Li into the global business spotlight.

Free Fire Changed Garena

Garena had spent years publishing other companies’ games.

Then it found a huge success of its own.

Free Fire became Garena’s flagship self-developed mobile game.

The battle-royale title gained a large audience, particularly in Southeast Asia and Latin America.

Free Fire helped Garena produce the cash that supported Sea’s wider business expansion.

The gaming operation remains large.

For Q2 2026, Garena reported:

• 666.3 million quarterly active users
• 68.1 million quarterly paying users
• US$763.5 million in bookings
• US$746.6 million in GAAP revenue

Those numbers show that gaming still matters to Sea.

A lot.

Sea’s Huge Growth During COVID-19

The pandemic pushed more people toward online shopping, gaming and digital payments.

Sea benefited from all three trends.

Shopee grew quickly.

Garena had strong user activity.

Sea’s share price climbed.

Li’s wealth increased with it.

At one point in August 2021, Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index reportedly placed him as Singapore’s richest person, with a fortune near US$19.8 billion.

That figure did not last.

Technology stocks later dropped sharply.

Sea was hit hard.

The Tough Period in 2022

Sea entered a difficult period during 2022.

Its share price had fallen.

Global technology valuations were under pressure.

Interest rates were rising.

Money was becoming more expensive.

Some of Sea’s international expansion plans were also struggling.

Li changed the company’s approach.

The target became financial self-sufficiency.

Costs were cut.

Some international operations were reduced or closed.

Management pay was affected too.

In September 2022, Li told employees that senior management would give up cash compensation until Sea reached self-sufficiency.

It was a sharp change.

But it worked.

Sea Reaches Profitability

By 2023, Sea had made major progress.

The company recorded its first full year of net profit since its public listing.

That was a big turnaround after years of spending heavily on growth.

For full-year 2025, Sea reported:

• US$22.9 billion in revenue
• US$10.2 billion in gross profit
• US$1.6 billion in net income
• US$3.4 billion in adjusted EBITDA

The business was no longer being judged only on growth.

Profit mattered too.

Sea Limited in 2026

Sea continued reporting large numbers in 2026.

For Q2 2026, it reported:

• Revenue: US$7.8 billion
• Gross profit: US$3.5 billion
• Net income: US$458.1 million
• Adjusted EBITDA: US$917.2 million

Li remained Chairman and CEO.

Shopee, Garena and Monee were still the group’s main businesses.

How Much of Sea Limited Does Forrest Li Own?

Li still holds a major economic stake in Sea.

More importantly, he has strong voting control.

Sea’s 2026 SEC filing reported that, as of March 31, 2026, Li beneficially controlled:

• 58,550,224 Class A ordinary shares
• 45,527,793 Class B ordinary shares
• about 16% of combined ordinary shares
• about 57.6% of total voting power

Why the big difference?

Class B shares carry more votes.

Li owns those Class B shares through Blue Dolphins Venture Inc.

So his economic ownership is far below 50%, but his voting position gives him major control over Sea.

Forrest Li’s Net Worth

Forbes valued Forrest Li at US$7.7 billion on its 2026 Singapore Rich List.

That figure can move quickly.

Most of his wealth is linked to Sea Limited shares.

If Sea stock rises, his estimated fortune can jump.

If the stock falls, the number drops.

So the safest way to describe his wealth is by attaching the estimate to a date or Forbes list rather than treating it as a fixed amount.

Forbes placed him among Singapore’s richest people in 2026.

Forrest Li and Singapore Football

Business is only part of Li’s public work now.

Football has become another major focus.

Li served on the Football Association of Singapore council from 2017 to 2021.

He later became much more directly involved with professional football.

Lion City Sailors

In 2020, Sea acquired Home United.

The club was renamed:

Lion City Sailors FC.

Li became its chairman.

The club invested in players, coaching, youth development, facilities and support staff.

In 2022, Lion City Sailors opened a training centre costing around S$10 million.

The project covered roughly 28,000 square metres.

The club later reached the 2025 AFC Champions League Two final.

That became a major result for Singapore club football.

Forrest Li Becomes FAS President

Li moved into national football leadership in 2025.

On April 28, 2025, his team won the Football Association of Singapore election.

He became:

President of the Football Association of Singapore for the 2025–2029 term.

His public football priorities have included youth development, the Singapore Premier League, national-team performance and better football systems.

Sea’s S$50 Million Football Commitment

In March 2026, Sea announced a S$50 million commitment to Singapore football development.

S$10 million had already been donated to the Football Association of Singapore.

Another S$40 million was planned for future football programmes.

One detail needs to stay clear.

This was announced as a Sea corporate contribution.

It should not be described as S$50 million personally donated by Forrest Li.

Forrest Li and NUS

Li joined the National University of Singapore Board of Trustees on April 1, 2021.

His connection with NUS also includes support from Sea.

Sea announced a S$50 million gift to NUS in 2021.

The funding supported computing education, research, scholarships and related programmes.

Li remains listed as an NUS trustee.

Forrest Li’s Stanford Role

Li has kept close ties with Stanford.

He currently serves as Vice Chair of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council.

Stanford also publicly recognises Forrest Li and Liqian Ma among its donors.

That connection goes back decades now.

Stanford helped shape Li’s early business thinking.

He later returned as an adviser and supporter.

Other Business Roles

Forrest Li also serves as an independent non-executive director of Shangri-La Asia Limited.

He previously served on the board of Singapore’s Economic Development Board.

That role ended in April 2026.

Older profiles may still call him a current EDB board member.

That information is outdated.

Li also served on Singapore’s Committee on the Future Economy from 2016 to 2017.

Awards and Recognition

Li has received several major business honours.

EY Entrepreneur Of The Year

In 2015, he won the:

EY Entrepreneur Of The Year – Internet and Mobile, Singapore

award.

He won the category award rather than the overall Singapore title.

Singapore Business Awards

Li was named:

Businessman of the Year 2019/2020

at the Singapore Business Awards.

The award recognised his work building Sea into a large international internet business.

Forrest Li and Artificial Intelligence

Sea has recently increased its work around artificial intelligence.

In 2026, the company set up an AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore.

Sea has also worked with major technology companies on AI projects.

Li has publicly described AI as an important opportunity for Sea’s businesses.

The technology can affect areas such as shopping recommendations, financial services, customer support, gaming and internal operations.

For Sea, the goal is practical.

Use AI where it helps the business.

Forrest Li’s Property

Li has also appeared in Singapore property reporting.

He bought a Good Class Bungalow property on Gallop Road for around S$26 million in 2018.

The site was later redeveloped.

In 2024, his wife Liqian Ma agreed to buy a neighbouring property for S$42.5 million.

These transactions have been reported by established Singapore business publications.

What Makes Forrest Li’s Career Different?

The failed startup matters.

So does the debt.

Li did not start Sea after a clean first win.

GG Game failed.

He still tried again.

Garena worked.

Then Li used that base to move into payments.

Then e-commerce.

Sea nearly lost investor confidence during the technology downturn.

Li changed course again.

That pattern appears throughout his career.

Try something.

Check what works.

Change what does not.

Keep going.

Simple idea. Tough execution.

What Is Forrest Li Doing Now?

As of 2026, Forrest Li remains closely involved in both business and football.

His confirmed major positions include:

• Founder, Chairman and CEO of Sea Limited
• President of the Football Association of Singapore
• Chairman of Lion City Sailors
• NUS Board of Trustees member
• Vice Chair of Stanford GSB’s Advisory Council
• Independent non-executive director of Shangri-La Asia

At Sea, his main work centres on Shopee, Garena, Monee and the company’s growing use of AI.

Forrest Li Career Timeline

Around 1977–1978: Born in Tianjin, China.

Early career: Works with Motorola and Corning.

2006: Graduates from Stanford GSB with an MBA.

After Stanford: Moves to Singapore and works with MTV Networks.

Before 2009: Starts GG Game, which later fails.

May 2009: Garena holding company is incorporated.

2010: Garena builds its League of Legends relationship.

2014: AirPay launches in Vietnam.

2015: Shopee launches.

2015: Li wins an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year category award.

2017: Garena parent company becomes Sea Limited.

October 2017: Sea lists on the New York Stock Exchange.

2020: Home United becomes Lion City Sailors.

2021: Li joins the NUS Board of Trustees.

2022: Sea starts major cost reductions and targets self-sufficiency.

2023: Sea records its first full-year net profit since its IPO.

2025: SeaMoney becomes Monee.

April 2025: Li becomes President of the Football Association of Singapore.

2025: Lion City Sailors reach the AFC Champions League Two final.

2026: Sea sets up an AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore.

March 2026: Sea announces a S$50 million football development commitment.

Final Thought

Forrest Li’s career is easy to describe after the success.

The beginning looked very different.

He had student debt.

His first startup failed.

He was building a gaming company in a region where online payments were still difficult.

Then Garena found traction.

Shopee followed.

Sea grew into a company spanning gaming, e-commerce and finance.

There were rough years too.

Sea’s stock fell hard, spending was cut and its international plans changed. Li stayed in control and pushed the company toward profit.

Now his work stretches beyond Sea.

Football, education and technology policy have all become part of his public life.

Still, Sea remains the main story.

It started with Garena.

And Li is still running it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Forrest Li?

Forrest Li is a Singaporean entrepreneur and the founder, Chairman and CEO of Sea Limited, which operates Shopee, Garena and Monee.

Where was Forrest Li born?

He was born in Tianjin, China.

How old is Forrest Li?

Sea Limited’s 2026 filing lists him as 48 years old. A reliable exact birth date is not publicly established.

What company did Forrest Li start?

He founded the company that became Sea Limited. Its original business was closely associated with Garena.

Is Forrest Li the founder of Shopee?

Shopee was launched by Sea in 2015 under Li’s leadership. Li is the founder and CEO of Sea Limited.

Who is Forrest Li’s wife?

He is married to Liqian Ma, who studied at Stanford and has been publicly identified alongside Li in Stanford records.

How rich is Forrest Li?

Forbes valued him at US$7.7 billion on its 2026 Singapore Rich List. His estimated wealth changes with Sea Limited’s share price.

What is Forrest Li doing now?

He remains Chairman and CEO of Sea Limited. He is also President of the Football Association of Singapore, Chairman of Lion City Sailors, an NUS trustee and Vice Chair of Stanford GSB’s Advisory Council.

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