Sea and OpenAI Launch First Regional Codex Hackathon in Singapore
Source: The Straits Times
Sea Limited and OpenAI have kicked off the first regional Codex hackathon series in Asia Pacific, beginning with a Singapore event on June 6 that brought over 150 developers to the Shopee Building. The partnership marks a deepening of ties between one of Southeast Asia's largest tech.
Sea Limited and OpenAI have kicked off the first regional Codex hackathon series in Asia Pacific, beginning with a Singapore event on June 6 that brought over 150 developers to the Shopee Building. The partnership marks a deepening of ties between one of Southeast Asia's largest tech companies and the world's most prominent AI lab, with 40 teams competing to build production-grade applications using OpenAI's Codex coding assistant.
The hackathon follows an unusual format — hard-capped at 40 teams with no remote option, single-venue, and disqualification for teams that leave mid-event. First prize offers US$30,000 in OpenAI API credits, and the top five teams receive free ChatGPT Pro subscriptions for every member. More significant than the prize pool is the strategic signal: Sea disclosed publicly for the first time that 87 per cent of its developers across Shopee, Garena, and SeaMoney use Codex weekly, a metric the company says proves the tool has "cleared the friction barrier" inside a large Asia-Pacific employer.
Singapore is the opening leg of a regional rollout that will extend to Indonesia, Taiwan, and Vietnam — markets that map directly onto Sea's core e-commerce and gaming footprint. David Chen, Shopee's Chief Product Officer, said the initiative is designed to give more developers across the region hands-on experience with frontier AI tooling. OpenAI's Head of Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, noted the company is "excited to work alongside Sea for our first regional hackathon series to expand access to Codex across APAC."
The event also signals a shift in OpenAI's Asia-Pacific strategy — moving from government-level partnerships toward platform collaborations with locally dominant tech companies. Rather than running its own developer events, OpenAI is embedding itself inside an ecosystem that already serves hundreds of millions of users across Southeast Asia. The hackathon's tight capacity and strict in-person requirement suggest quality and product focus matter more than scale for this initial edition.
Why it matters for Singapore: A Singapore-founded company partnering with OpenAI for a region-first initiative places the city-state at the centre of developer talent development in Southeast Asia. For local engineers and startups, the hackathon creates a direct pipeline to one of the most important AI platforms in the world. The 87 per cent internal adoption rate at Sea also offers a rare data point on how deeply AI coding tools have penetrated a major Singapore-headquartered technology organisation — a benchmark other local employers will be watching closely.