Forrest Li and his friends founded Garena in Singapore and within a year expanded Garena's presence to Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines and the CIS. Most recently, Garena extended its reach to Thailand and Indonesia.

Garena started in 2007 as an Esports community. Through the experience, the founders was fascinated with the rapid evolution of online games. Inspired to build a great gaming company together, Forrest and his friends incorporated Garena in 2009 with their passion to bring the online gaming experience to a higher level.

Garena launched its flagship online game platform in 2010. Known as Garena+, the social platform is designed for online gamers to meet, chat and play games with each other. On Garena+, gamers are able to effortlessly discover and play games while connecting with other gamers. Garena+ provides gamers with the ability to track gameplay, view the achievements of their buddies through a centralized buddy list, connect with clans and groups of similar interests on games, and voice chat with many gamers simultaneously through public or private channels. Within one year time, the monthly active users on Garena+ surpassed the 1 million mark.

In addition to providing an esports playground for popular classics such as DotA and Age of Empire, Garena also introduced latest premium online games on Garena+, including the award-winning League of Legends and other premium game titles, such as the first-person shooting game Black Shot and real-time strategy game Heroes of Newerth.