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Games - Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Asia Games Community Garena Raises $2M From Angels

Forrest Li, CEO and co-founder of, gets in touch to inform us that his startup company named Garena has raised $2M from angel investors, including a co-founder of Skype, Tovio Annus as well as the Government of Singapore.

With its base in Singapore, Garena claims more than 5.5M registered users, mostly in Asia. The platform was born of the LAN-based games movement, pushing this to the Internet to make it easier for gamers to play multi-player games. Garena is short for Global Arena and also hosts tournaments for gamers, with as many as 10,000 cyber warriors. One of the key technologies here is anti-cheating.

Garena has also announced a collaboration with MTV Asia. Garena’s registered users can now watch the latest MTV videos, animations, and shows via an integrated player.

The startup's model is ad-driven but we can easily see some paid content components coming online.

The company's CEO graduated from Standford Business School in June 2006 and he founded Garena
a year ago.

The company seems like a clear winner so its surprising to see that there are not more big name investors clamoring for a piece. Perhaps its just because the CEO may come across as green but we expect to see Garena pop.

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