Betting on AI to Join the Trillion-Dollar Club? Shopee's Parent Company Establishes AI Investment Team, Accelerating Strategic Transformation

[Ebrun Original] Sea Limited, the Singapore-headquartered Southeast Asian internet giant and parent company of Shopee, is elevating artificial intelligence to an unprecedented strategic level.

On June 12, foreign media reported that the company has quietly established a new AI investment team, directly under the President's Office. This team is dedicated to scouting and investing in promising AI startups globally while also spearheading the incubation and promotion of multiple internal AI projects. This move is seen by the outside world as a clear signal of Sea's systematic strategic transformation—as its core e-commerce business gradually matures, Southeast Asia's largest internet company is attempting to rewrite its growth narrative with AI and move closer to its goal of a "trillion-dollar market capitalization."

Informed sources revealed that this newly established investment team is led by Sea's senior executive, Zhang Endong. In addition to overseeing external AI investment activities, Zhang Endong also directly manages several newly created internal projects, specifically focused on researching how to accelerate the promotion and application of AI technology across the entire group. The sources also indicated that Zhang Endong's team is just one of several within Sea exploring AI opportunities, but as a core member of the company's management, he has been entrusted with the important responsibility of driving the AI transformation across the entire Sea group. A Sea spokesperson declined to comment on the related organizational adjustments.

The background for this structural adjustment can be traced back to an internal statement last year by the company's founder and CEO, Forrest Li. As previously disclosed by The Wall Street Journal, Li explicitly stated in an internal memo that if Sea can seize the immense wave of value creation by AI and make the right choices on key decisions, the company has the opportunity to enter the "trillion-dollar market capitalization club" in the future. In this blueprint, Sea is attempting to tell a story not just of a regional e-commerce leader, but of a next-generation technology platform encompassing AI-powered e-commerce, AI-powered finance, AI infrastructure, and AI investment.

Sea clearly needs a bigger story like this. After years of rapid expansion, its e-commerce platform, Shopee, has entered a relatively mature phase. The Southeast Asian e-commerce market is still growing, but its growth rate can no longer be compared to the doubling expansion seen between 2018 and 2022. Currently, Shopee not only faces continuous competition from established rivals like Lazada and newer forces like TikTok Shop but also challenges from overseas platforms like Taobao and Pinduoduo. For the capital markets, a regional e-commerce company might support a valuation of tens of billions of dollars, but a successful AI platform could very well justify the imagination of hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars in valuation. Finding a second growth curve "beyond e-commerce" has shifted from an option to a necessity.

Entering 2026, Sea's moves in the AI field have noticeably accelerated, with a series of actions indicating its AI strategy has evolved from localized business applications to a systematic project encompassing investment, R&D, talent, and infrastructure. In February of this year, Sea announced an expanded partnership with Google to jointly develop an AI shopping agent. The vision is that in the future, users will no longer need to search for products item by item using keywords; instead, they can directly express their needs to an AI, which will handle the entire process of screening, comparing, and recommending products. Subsequently, in April, Sea officially established an AI Center of Excellence in Singapore. Supported by Singapore's Digital Industry Office, the center plans to create at least 100 R&D and innovation positions locally over the next three years, covering areas such as AI research, engineering development, and product innovation. The company explicitly stated at the time that this move was a significant step towards its goal of becoming an "AI-native enterprise."

One of the core technical assets of the AI Center of Excellence is Sea's self-developed 245-billion-parameter large language model, Compass Max v3.5. This model is specifically optimized for Southeast Asia's multilingual environment and e-commerce application scenarios and is now officially deployed on the Shopee platform, powering multiple AI features. The company claims that compared to mainstream commercial large models on the market, this model maintains higher response speeds while operating at only a fraction of the cost. Through continuous investment in cutting-edge R&D, Sea hopes to further widen its advantage in localized AI capabilities within Southeast Asia.

While accelerating its own AI capability building, Sea has not concealed its intention to leverage investment to unlock greater value. The establishment of this AI investment team signifies that Sea not only wants to be a user and developer of AI but also hopes to become an investor in the AI field, similar to companies like SoftBank, Tencent, and Alibaba. The group is injecting funds into both internal AI projects and external AI investments, attempting to capture the capital opportunities brought by technological change on a broader scale.

Focusing on actual AI applications that have been implemented, during the Q1 earnings call, Shopee's management disclosed the practical progress of AI applications, emphasizing that the company adopts a "pragmatic, results-oriented approach." Based on disclosed data, AI has indeed begun to have a quantifiable impact on actual business. Empowered by AI technology, the platform's purchase conversion rate increased by 14% year-over-year; approximately 80% of customer inquiries are now handled by AI chatbots, with the cost per contact for customer service decreasing by about 30% year-over-year while maintaining high satisfaction levels.

Looking ahead, Forrest Li revealed on the call that for consumers, Shopee is testing an AI shopping assistant that leverages users' purchase history and preferences to provide personalized recommendations and optimize promotional offers. For sellers, the platform is building an AI agent to serve as a virtual business consultant, providing diagnostics on store performance and actionable suggestions.

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