Ramp

Sea Group

Ramp

Ramp makes money from interchange fees — the 1.5-2.5% that merchants pay on every credit card transaction. Unlike consumer cards that share interchange with users through rewards, Ramp gives a flat 1.5% cashback and keeps the rest.

The real business model is becoming the financial operating system for companies: once a company uses Ramp's card, they also use Ramp for expense management, bill pay, accounting automation, and procurement — all of which increase switching costs and customer lifetime value.

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.

Ramp

Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh had previously co-founded Paribus, a tool that automatically got refunds when prices dropped on things you'd already bought. Capital One acquired Paribus in 2016.

The experience taught them something: businesses were terrible at managing their spending, and the tools they used — corporate credit cards from Amex and Chase — were designed to encourage spending, not control it.

In 2019, they launched Ramp with a contrarian premise. Every other corporate card company made money by getting businesses to spend more (higher spend = more interchange revenue).

Ramp would make money from interchange too, but would actively help businesses spend less through automated expense management, duplicate subscription detection, and price negotiation.

The pitch to CFOs was irresistible: get a corporate card with 1.5% cashback, and we'll also find you an average of 5% savings on your total spending through our software. The card was the wedge.

The expense management platform was the real product.

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.

Ramp

Ramp grew by selling savings, not credit. The pitch to finance teams was: "We'll save you more money than we cost you." In an era when every company was looking to cut costs, Ramp offered a corporate card that came with a free expense management platform that actively found savings.

CFOs couldn't say no.

The product-led approach bypassed traditional enterprise sales cycles. A finance manager could sign up for Ramp, issue cards, and start seeing savings within a week — no six-month procurement process, no IT integration project.

The free expense management tools were so good that companies switched from Concur, Expensify, and Brex just for the software, with the card as a bonus.

Speed of execution was the differentiator. Ramp shipped features faster than any competitor.

They went from a corporate card to a full financial operations platform in three years. Every quarter, Ramp launched features that competitors took a year to build.

By 2024, over 25,000 businesses were using Ramp and the company was processing tens of billions in annualized spend.

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.

Ramp

Brex is the obvious competitor. Brex launched two years before Ramp with a similar corporate card concept and had the first-mover advantage.

But Brex pivoted away from small businesses to focus on enterprise in 2022 — angering thousands of existing customers — while Ramp doubled down on serving companies of all sizes. The competition has become a case study in strategic focus versus strategic pivots.

The "spend less" positioning has a mathematical ceiling. If Ramp's AI genuinely helps companies spend less, the interchange revenue from those companies also decreases.

There's an inherent tension between the mission (reduce spending) and the revenue model (earn a percentage of spending). Ramp has managed this by growing the customer base faster than individual customer spending declines.

Enterprise sales is the next frontier and it's expensive. Moving upmarket from startups and mid-market companies to Fortune 500 enterprises requires a sales team, implementation support, and enterprise features that cost real money to build and sell.

Ramp has been investing heavily in enterprise capabilities, but competing with Amex and JP Morgan for large corporate accounts is a different game than winning startups.

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.

Ramp

Ramp Corporate Card is the core — unlimited physical and virtual cards with 1.5% cashback and built-in spend controls. Ramp Expense Management automates receipt matching, policy enforcement, and reimbursements.

Ramp Bill Pay handles vendor payments and AP automation. Ramp Procurement manages vendor contracts and purchase approvals.

Ramp Intelligence uses AI to identify duplicate subscriptions, negotiate better rates, and flag wasteful spending. Ramp Flex offers flexible payment terms for businesses that need to extend their payables cycle.

Ramp Accounting automates close processes and syncs with QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, and Sage.

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.

Ramp

Founders Fund, D1 Capital, Stripe, Goldman Sachs, Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures

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).