Compare / Warby Parker vs Sea Group
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Warby Parker
Sea Group
BUSINESS MODEL
Warby Parker
Vertically integrated direct-to-consumer eyewear. Warby Parker designs frames in-house, works directly with manufacturers, and sells through its website, app and its own stores, skipping the traditional licensing and wholesale markups.
Glasses still start at $95 including basic prescription lenses, with upgrades for progressives and special coatings. Revenue comes from prescription glasses, sunglasses, contact lenses and eye exams in stores.
What started online-only now runs mostly on physical retail, with 323 stores at the end of 2025. Net revenue was $872 million in 2025, and it was the company's first full year of net profit.
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.
HOW THEY STARTED
Warby Parker
Dave Gilboa lost a $700 pair of glasses while backpacking before starting at Wharton, and replacing them was so expensive he spent his first semester squinting. He complained about it to classmates Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt and Jeffrey Raider, and they started digging into why glasses cost so much.
The answer was Luxottica, the Italian giant that owned Ray-Ban, Oakley, LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut and Pearle Vision, the vision insurer EyeMed, and licenses for luxury brands like Chanel and Prada. One company touched almost every step from design to retail.
With a small seed check from Wharton's Venture Initiation Program, the four launched Warby Parker in February 2010, selling prescription glasses online for $95. GQ called them "the Netflix of eyewear," they hit their first-year sales target in about three weeks, and they built a waitlist of around 20,000 people.
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.
HOW THEY GREW
Warby Parker
The DTC playbook: build a beautiful brand, price far below incumbents, and tell a story about why the old way was a rip-off. Home Try-On, five frames mailed to try at home for free, doubled as marketing as customers posted photos asking friends to vote.
"Buy a Pair, Give a Pair" gave the brand a social mission, and by 2025 it had distributed more than 20 million pairs through its partners. Then it went physical, opening stores that now drive most sales, with 47 new stores in 2025 and about 50 more planned for 2026.
It added eye exams and Scout contact lenses to sell more to each customer, and in 2025 partnered with Google and Samsung on AI-powered smart glasses.
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.
THE HARD PART
Warby Parker
EssilorLuxottica, formed when Luxottica merged with the world's biggest lens maker, is still a giant with resources Warby Parker cannot match, and it now sells the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. After the 2021 direct listing the stock fell more than 70% from its highs as the direct-to-consumer bubble deflated.
Opening dozens of stores a year is capital intensive, and each one has to earn its keep. Cheaper online rivals like Zenni and EyeBuyDirect undercut it on price.
And people only buy glasses every year or two, so the business depends on keeping customers for a long time. Its big new bet, AI glasses with Google, puts it head to head with Meta.
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.
THE PRODUCTS
Warby Parker
Prescription eyeglasses starting at $95 including basic lenses — the product that broke the Luxottica pricing model. Home Try-On — pick five frames online, receive them in a box, try them at home for free, return what you don't want.
Progressive lenses and blue-light-filtering options for higher-end needs. Prescription and non-prescription sunglasses.
Scout contact lenses — Warby Parker's daily disposable contact lens brand. In-store eye exams with licensed optometrists.
Virtual Try-On using iPhone face-scanning technology to see frames on your face through the app.
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.
WHO BACKED THEM
Warby Parker
Tiger Global Management led the $12.5 million Series A in 2011 and the $60 million Series C in 2013, and was still sitting on a stake worth about $850 million at the direct listing. General Catalyst led the 2012 Series B.
T. Rowe Price led the 2015 and 2018 rounds, and D1 Capital Partners and Durable Capital Partners backed the $245 million raised in 2020 at a $3 billion valuation.
American Express and J.Crew's Mickey Drexler were also early investors. The company went public on the NYSE through a direct listing on September 29, 2021.
In 2025 Google agreed to put up to $150 million into a smart glasses partnership, part of it as an equity stake.
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).