Palantir

Sea Group

Palantir

Palantir's business model is enterprise software — specifically, large multi-year contracts with governments and corporations. Contracts typically start at $1-5 million and can scale to hundreds of millions annually for large government agencies.

The sales process is uniquely intensive. Palantir deploys "forward-deployed engineers" (FDEs) who embed directly with customers for months, configuring the platform for specific use cases.

This hands-on approach is expensive but creates deep integration that makes switching nearly impossible. Once Palantir is embedded in an organization's workflows, it's practically permanent.

Revenue split has shifted over time. Government contracts (US and allied nations) historically dominated, but commercial revenue has been growing faster.

By 2024, commercial revenue approached 45% of total. Annual revenue exceeded $2.8 billion.

The company has been profitable since 2023.

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.

Palantir

Palantir was born from the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Peter Thiel — PayPal co-founder and contrarian investor — realized that the same fraud-detection algorithms PayPal used to catch financial criminals could help intelligence agencies catch terrorists.

The US government had mountains of data but terrible tools for connecting the dots.

Thiel co-founded Palantir in 2003 with Alex Karp (a Stanford law graduate who then took a PhD in social theory at Goethe University in Frankfurt, studying under Jürgen Habermas), Joe Lonsdale (a Stanford student who'd worked at Clarium Capital), Stephen Cohen (an engineer), and Nathan Gettings (a Clarium colleague). They named it after the palantíri in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings — the seeing stones that let you view distant events.

The CIA's venture arm, In-Q-Tel, was the first investor and first customer simultaneously. The initial product, Palantir Gotham, was built specifically for intelligence analysts who needed to find connections across massive, messy datasets — linking phone records, financial transactions, travel data, and classified intelligence into a single coherent picture.

The company operated in extreme secrecy for its first decade, with most employees unable to discuss what they actually built.

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.

Palantir

Palantir's growth strategy for two decades was simple: get inside the US government, prove indispensable, and expand from there. CIA led to NSA.

NSA led to the Army. The Army led to the Air Force.

Each agency saw what the others were doing and wanted it.

The AIP launch in 2023 was the commercial growth inflection point. By integrating large language models into the platform, Palantir made its data analytics accessible to non-technical users.

A supply chain manager could ask questions in plain English and get answers from their data. This dramatically expanded the potential user base within existing customers and attracted new commercial clients.

"Boot camps" became the commercial go-to-market innovation. Palantir runs intensive multi-day workshops where potential customers bring their actual data and problems, and Palantir engineers build working prototypes on the spot.

Companies leave with tangible proof of value, which accelerates the sales cycle dramatically.

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.

Palantir

The ethical debate follows Palantir everywhere. Privacy advocates have criticized Palantir's work with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), police departments, and intelligence agencies.

The company has been accused of enabling mass surveillance. Karp has been unapologetic — arguing that democracies need powerful analytical tools and it's better that a company with ethical guidelines builds them than the alternative.

Customer concentration was a historical risk. For years, a handful of massive government contracts drove the majority of revenue.

Losing a single contract could crater a quarter. The push into commercial has diversified the revenue base, but government still represents over 55% of revenue.

Valuation has been the market debate. Palantir trades at astronomical revenue multiples (60-80x revenue at its 2024 peaks), which assumes massive future growth that may or may not materialize.

Bears argue it's the most overvalued stock in tech. Bulls argue that AIP will drive exponential commercial growth.

The debate is loud and ongoing.

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.

Palantir

Palantir Gotham — the original intelligence platform used by government agencies for counterterrorism, military operations, and law enforcement. Integrates and analyzes data from disparate classified and unclassified sources.

Palantir Foundry — the commercial platform that lets corporations build data-driven applications without coding. Used for supply chain optimization, clinical trials, financial modeling, and manufacturing.

Palantir AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform) — launched in 2023, this layer brings large language models and generative AI into Palantir's existing platforms, letting users query and act on their data using natural language. The product that supercharged the stock price.

Palantir Apollo — a continuous delivery system that manages software deployment across every environment: cloud, on-premise, classified networks, and even air-gapped military systems.

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.

Palantir

In-Q-Tel (the CIA's venture arm) was the first investor and provided both capital and credibility. Peter Thiel's Founders Fund invested from the founding.

The company raised extensively from institutional investors including Tiger Global, Dragoneer, and Sompo Holdings. The September 2020 direct listing on the NYSE (similar to Spotify — no new shares sold) valued the company at approximately $22 billion.

The stock subsequently surged past a $200 billion market cap in early 2025.

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).