Sea Ltd (NYSE: SE), the biggest tech giant in Southeast Asia, is about to kickstart the biggest fundraising drive ever seen for a tech company from the region. It’s filed to raise a huge amount of money by selling equity and bonds on the public markets – $6.3bn to be precise.

• Sea is a Singapore-based tech conglomerate and holding company for three major businesses which are Shopee, an e-commerce platform; Garena, a mobile games developer; and SeaMoney, a payments processing platform. With $4.4bn in 2020 revenue, Sea is Southeast Asia’s biggest tech company and yet still growing solidly.

• Over the past few years, Sea has experienced growth that can only be described as astounding. For example, it grew annual sales from $1bn in 2018 to $2.9bn in 2019 to $4.4bn in 2020. That growth has made the company an investor favorite with a current market cap of $174bn, the biggest of any company in Southeast Asia.

• Capitalizing on the investor fanfare, Sea has filed to raise a whopping $6.3bn from selling shares and bonds on the open markets. The company wants to sell 11 million shares of itself, amounting to about $3.8bn at its current price, then $2.5bn in convertible bonds, summing up to $6.3bn. Even more, the bond offering has an over-allotment option of $375mn attached though there’s no certainty it will sell that much.

• This is a bold step for Sea as $6.3bn would mark the biggest fundraising ever for a Southeast Asian company in current history. But, it’s not like $6.3bn is impossible to get for a company that’s favored by investors, especially on the American markets where there are boatloads of money always chasing new deals. Sea is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

• Sea is likely raising this new money to pursue an aggressive expansion strategy, the type that has driven its astounding growth over the years. Currently, the company reports having about $7bn of cash at hand and could almost double that with its new fundraising, giving it ample money to fund its expansion across Asia and freshly Europe.

• Right now, the biggest fundraising on record for a Southeast Asian tech company is that of Grab, a ride-hailing giant in the region, that raised over $4bn from merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) this year. Now, it appears that Sea may beat that in the span of a few months, signaling that there’s a big funding boom for the tech industry in the region.

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