Perplexity AI

Sea Group

Perplexity AI

Perplexity uses a freemium model. The free tier gives unlimited basic searches powered by a standard model.

Perplexity Pro costs $20/month and gives access to more powerful frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, alongside Perplexity's own, unlimited Pro searches, file uploads, and image generation. Perplexity Enterprise Pro is designed for businesses with team management and API access.

The company also recently introduced advertising through "sponsored follow-up questions" — a controversial move that some see as inevitable and others see as the beginning of the end for ad-free search.

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.

Perplexity AI

Aravind Srinivas grew up in Chennai, India, got a PhD in AI from UC Berkeley, and worked as a research intern at OpenAI and a researcher at DeepMind. He watched the ChatGPT explosion in late 2022 and saw something everyone else missed: AI chatbots were interesting, but AI-powered search was potentially more valuable.

Google search hadn't fundamentally changed since 1998. It still showed you a list of links and made you do the work of reading and synthesizing information.

Srinivas co-founded Perplexity AI in August 2022 with Denis Yarats (ex-Meta AI), Johnny Ho (ex-Quora), and Andy Konwinski (co-creator of Apache Spark). Their idea was an "answer engine" — you ask a question, Perplexity searches the internet in real time, reads the sources, and gives you a synthesized answer with inline citations.

No ads. No SEO spam.

Just answers.

The product launched quietly and grew through word of mouth among researchers, developers, and knowledge workers who were frustrated with Google's increasingly ad-cluttered, SEO-gamed results. Within a year, Perplexity was handling millions of queries daily.

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.

Perplexity AI

Perplexity grew almost entirely through product quality and word of mouth. The first users were AI researchers and tech workers who shared it on Twitter.

Every time someone used Perplexity and got a better answer than Google, they posted about it. The product was its own marketing.

The mobile app was a growth accelerator. By launching on iOS and Android early, Perplexity captured users who wanted quick answers on their phones.

The app was faster than opening a browser and Googling — one tap, ask your question, get an answer. Mobile usage now exceeds desktop.

Strategic distribution deals expanded reach. Perplexity partnered with SoftBank (default AI assistant on SoftBank phones in Japan), Deutsche Telekom, and various hardware manufacturers to be pre-installed as the default search assistant.

These deals put Perplexity in front of millions of users who had never heard of it.

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.

Perplexity AI

Google is the elephant in the room. Google controls 90%+ of the search market and generates $175 billion annually from search advertising.

Google has responded to Perplexity by adding AI Overviews to search results — essentially copying the answer engine concept. Google has unlimited data, unlimited compute, and the default position on every browser and phone.

Competing with Google for search is historically a death sentence.

The publisher problem is real and litigious. Perplexity synthesizes content from news articles and websites without driving traffic back to those publishers.

Multiple media companies have accused Perplexity of scraping their content and delivering it as answers, depriving them of page views and ad revenue. The New York Times, Forbes, and Condé Nast have all raised concerns.

If publishers successfully block Perplexity or win legal challenges, the product's utility decreases.

Monetization without ads is nearly impossible at scale. Perplexity initially positioned itself as the ad-free alternative to Google.

But $20/month subscriptions can't fund the compute costs of an answer engine serving hundreds of millions of queries. The introduction of sponsored questions signals that pure subscription revenue isn't enough.

Whether Perplexity can add ads without becoming what it set out to replace is the defining question.

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.

Perplexity AI

Perplexity Search is the core — ask any question and get an AI-synthesized answer with cited sources. Pro Search performs multi-step research, asking clarifying questions and digging deeper for complex queries.

Perplexity Pages lets users create shareable research articles from their queries. Collections organize saved searches and threads.

The Perplexity API lets developers integrate the answer engine into their own products. Perplexity recently added Spaces for team collaboration on research projects.

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.

Perplexity AI

Jeff Bezos, IVP, NEA, Databricks Ventures, Nvidia, SoftBank

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).