Figma

Sea Group

Figma

Figma uses a freemium model. Individual designers can use Figma for free with up to three active projects.

Teams pay per editor per month — $15 for Professional, $45 for Organization and $75 for Enterprise. Viewers are always free, which was revolutionary.

In Sketch, if a developer wanted to inspect a design, they needed a license. In Figma, you just send them a link.

This "free viewers, paid editors" model was genius because it turned every designer into a distribution channel. A designer joins a company, uses Figma, invites 50 engineers and PMs to view files, and suddenly the whole company is embedded in the Figma ecosystem.

When decision-makers see everyone already using it, upgrading to a paid team plan is automatic.

Revenue grew from essentially nothing in 2018 to over $600 million a year by 2023, and past $700 million by the time the company went public in 2025. The company was profitable by mid-2022 — unusual for a venture-backed startup.

They achieved this without a massive enterprise sales team. The product spread bottom-up through organizations, designer by designer, team by team.

Sea Group

Sea runs three distinct businesses under one roof, and the genius of the structure is how they feed each other.

Garena is the gaming division. It develops and publishes games — most famously Free Fire, which Sea built itself after years of just licensing other people's games.

Free Fire launched in 2017 and became a phenomenon in emerging markets. It's a battle royale game optimized for low-end Android devices and slow internet connections.

Exactly the phone most people in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and India actually own. Garena makes money through in-game purchases — skins, characters, seasonal passes.

At its peak, Free Fire had over 100 million daily active users.

Shopee is the e-commerce marketplace. It operates like a hybrid of Amazon and eBay — sellers list products, buyers purchase, Sea handles payments, logistics coordination, and marketing.

Shopee makes money through advertising, transaction fees, and value-added services for sellers. It's now the dominant e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia and has a significant presence in Brazil.

SeaMoney is the fintech arm. It offers mobile wallets, digital payments, buy-now-pay-later, and banking services through MariBank in Singapore.

The pitch is simple: hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia are unbanked or underbanked. Give them a mobile wallet tied to their Shopee account and they'll use it for everything.

It's the super-app play, executed patiently.

Figma

Dylan Field dropped out of Brown University in 2012 after interning at Flipboard and winning a Thiel Fellowship — Peter Thiel's program that pays students $100,000 to leave college and start something. His co-founder Evan Wallace was a Brown classmate and graphics programming wizard who'd built impressive WebGL demos that proved browsers could handle complex visual work.

Their original idea wasn't even a design tool. Field initially wanted to build a flight search engine, then pivoted to drone photography, before landing on the insight that would define Figma: professional creative tools were stuck in the desktop era while everything else had moved to the cloud.

Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch — all required downloads, all worked on local files, and none of them let two people work on the same file simultaneously.

The technical challenge was enormous. Nobody believed you could build a high-performance vector graphics editor that ran entirely in a web browser.

Field and Wallace spent three years — 2012 to 2015 — just building the rendering engine before they had a product anyone could use. They basically had to invent new technology for browser-based graphics processing.

The first public beta launched in December 2015, and designers immediately noticed something no other tool offered: real-time multiplayer editing, like Google Docs but for design.

Sea Group

Forrest Li moved from China to Singapore in 2005 to do his MBA at Stanford. He didn't go back.

In 2009, he founded Garena — which literally means 'Global Arena' — as an online gaming platform for Southeast Asia. The region was massively underserved.

Hundreds of millions of young, mobile-first users with low PC penetration but exploding smartphone adoption. Nobody was building for them.

Li saw that gap and went straight at it.

Garena started by licensing popular PC games — League of Legends, FIFA Online — and localizing them for markets like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. It was a straightforward licensing model, unglamorous, not the kind of thing that gets TechCrunch headlines.

But it worked. Garena quietly became the dominant gaming platform across Southeast Asia.

The company rebranded to Sea Limited in 2017 when it IPO'd on the New York Stock Exchange, raising $884 million. By then, Li had already launched Shopee in 2015 — an e-commerce marketplace — and SeaMoney, a digital payments and financial services arm, was taking shape.

Three businesses. One holding company.

The bet was that gaming would fund the others until they could stand on their own. That's exactly what happened.

Figma

Figma grew almost entirely through product-led growth — the product was so good and so easy to share that it spread virally through design teams. Every shared Figma link was marketing.

Every viewer who saw a design file in their browser without downloading anything was a conversion event.

The "free viewers" decision was the single most important growth lever. Traditional design tools charged per seat.

Figma said: only editors pay, everyone else is free. This removed all friction from collaboration and meant that for every paying designer, there might be 10-20 free viewers — all of whom experienced the product and became advocates.

Community was the second engine. Figma's open plugin system and free template marketplace created an ecosystem that locked in users.

Designers built their workflows around Figma-specific plugins, teams built design systems in Figma components, and switching costs climbed. By 2022, Figma had become the default — not just a design tool, but the operating system for product design.

Sea Group

The counterintuitive move was using gaming to subsidize e-commerce. Most tech companies pick a lane.

Sea used Garena's cash flows — which were enormous when Free Fire was at its peak — to fund Shopee's aggressive, money-losing expansion. They didn't need to raise debt or dilute shareholders to burn cash in new markets.

The gaming division was basically an ATM.

Free Fire itself was a masterclass in product-market fit. Instead of porting a premium game to low-end markets and watching it fail, Sea built a battle royale game from scratch that ran on 1GB RAM Android phones with patchy 3G connections.

The game was optimized for exactly the hardware that 800 million people in emerging markets actually owned. Nobody else was doing that.

Shopee's growth hack was localization taken to an almost absurd degree. They didn't just translate the app.

They hired local teams in every market, ran country-specific campaigns, integrated local payment methods, and partnered with local logistics providers. In Brazil, they ran Shopee-branded motorbike delivery.

In Indonesia, they integrated with hundreds of local courier companies. The playbook was: be more local than the locals.

The final piece was the flywheel. A Garena user downloads Free Fire, spends money on in-game items using SeaMoney's wallet, then starts buying physical goods on Shopee with the same wallet.

Three products, one ecosystem, one user. That's the compounding effect Li was building toward from day one.

Figma

The Adobe acquisition saga was the biggest test. In September 2022, Adobe announced it would acquire Figma for $20 billion — the largest private software acquisition ever proposed.

Designers panicked. Would Adobe kill Figma's culture?

Bloat it with features? Integrate it into Creative Cloud and ruin the simplicity?

The deal fell apart in December 2023 when European regulators signaled they'd block it on antitrust grounds. Adobe walked away and paid a $1 billion breakup fee.

Figma was independent again — but now had to prove it could grow into a $20 billion company on its own.

Competition is intensifying. Canva is pushing into professional design.

Adobe is rebuilding its own collaborative tools. And newer entrants are using AI to generate designs automatically, potentially reducing the need for traditional design tools altogether.

Figma's challenge is staying ahead in a market it created while expanding into adjacent categories like presentations, whiteboarding, and development handoff.

Sea Group

The post-pandemic collapse was brutal and nearly existential for the stock, if not the business. During COVID, Sea was the perfect story — gaming was up, e-commerce was up, digital payments were up.

The stock hit $372 in October 2021. Market cap touched $200 billion.

Sea was the most valuable company ever to come out of Southeast Asia.

Then the world opened back up. Free Fire's daily active users fell off a cliff as people left their homes again.

Garena had funded the empire, and now the empire's funding engine was broken. Sea lost its license to publish Free Fire in India after the Indian government banned Chinese-linked apps.

India had been a massive market. Gone overnight.

Sea responded by cutting costs aggressively — laying off staff, retreating from markets like France, Spain, Poland, and India where Shopee had expanded without yet reaching profitability. The stock fell from $372 to under $40 by early 2023.

A 90% drawdown. That's not a correction.

That's a reset.

The deeper challenge is structural. Shopee competes with Lazada (backed by Alibaba), TikTok Shop (which has exploded in Southeast Asia), and increasingly with Temu and Shein.

These are not small competitors. TikTok Shop in particular has disrupted the e-commerce landscape in Indonesia and Thailand faster than most analysts expected.

Sea has scale and local knowledge, but the fight for Southeast Asia's e-commerce market is far from over.

Figma

Figma Design — the core browser-based interface design tool with real-time multiplayer collaboration, component libraries, auto-layout, and prototyping. FigJam — a collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, diagramming, and planning that competes with Miro and Mural.

Dev Mode — a workspace specifically for developers to inspect designs, extract code snippets, and understand spacing and styling without bothering designers. Figma Slides — presentation software launched in 2024 that lets teams build slide decks using the same design tools and component libraries.

Community — a marketplace of free and paid design templates, plugins, and UI kits created by designers worldwide.

Sea Group

Free Fire is the crown jewel — a mobile battle royale game with over 100 million daily active users at its peak, built specifically for low-end Android devices in emerging markets. It's been the most downloaded mobile game globally multiple times and remains dominant across Southeast Asia and Latin America despite declining from its COVID peak.

Shopee is Sea's e-commerce marketplace and the business with the highest long-term ceiling. It operates across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan, and Brazil.

It's consistently ranked the most-visited e-commerce site in Southeast Asia. The app includes livestream shopping, local seller tools, Shopee Pay, and Shopee Food in select markets.

SeaMoney — now operating as the financial services umbrella — includes ShopeePay (mobile wallet integrated with the Shopee checkout), SeaBank (a licensed digital bank in the Philippines and Indonesia), and MariBank (a digital bank in Singapore). The pitch is financial inclusion for the underbanked, backed by transaction data from Shopee.

Figma

Index Ventures led the Series A and has been involved in nearly every round. Greylock Partners was an early backer.

Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital invested in growth rounds. Addition (Lee Fixel's fund) led the Series E that valued Figma at $10 billion.

After the Adobe deal collapsed, a 2024 tender offer valued Figma at $12.5 billion, and the company went public on the NYSE in July 2025 at a considerably higher price. Peter Thiel was indirectly connected through the Thiel Fellowship that funded Dylan Field's early journey.

Sea Group

Sea went public in 2017 without needing a late-stage mega-round from the usual suspects. But it had institutional backing from early on.

Tencent is the most significant external shareholder — the Chinese gaming giant held a roughly 22% stake at various points, which gave Sea both credibility in gaming and a complicated geopolitical headache as anti-China sentiment grew in Southeast Asia and the U.S.

Naveen Tewari's General Atlantic and other growth equity funds participated in rounds before the IPO. Post-IPO, Sea attracted attention from large institutional investors including T.

Rowe Price, BlackRock, and various sovereign wealth funds drawn to the Southeast Asia growth story.

Masayoshi Son's SoftBank also took a stake — consistent with SoftBank's bet on emerging market consumer internet platforms. The Tencent relationship is the most interesting one because it's both a competitive asset (access to gaming IP and distribution) and a liability (political risk in markets sensitive to Chinese corporate influence).