Wiz

Sea Group

Wiz

Wiz sells annual subscriptions based on the number of cloud workloads (virtual machines, containers, serverless functions) protected. Pricing scales with cloud consumption — as customers use more cloud, they pay Wiz more.

This aligns perfectly with the broader trend of growing cloud spend.

The agentless model is a key pricing advantage. Traditional security tools require installing software agents on every server, which creates deployment costs, performance overhead, and maintenance burden.

Wiz connects via API to cloud provider accounts and scans everything externally. Deployment takes minutes instead of months, which dramatically shortens the sales cycle.

ARR growth was record-breaking: $1 million within months of launch, $100 million in 18 months, $350 million by 2023, and reportedly over $500 million by 2024. No enterprise SaaS company has ever scaled this fast.

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.

Wiz

The four Wiz co-founders — Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica, and Roy Reznik — had already built and sold a cybersecurity company together. Their previous startup, Adallom, was a cloud security company that Microsoft acquired in 2015 for $320 million.

After the acquisition, all four worked at Microsoft leading the Cloud Security Group.

By 2020, they were ready to leave and build again. They saw a gap in cloud security: as companies rushed workloads to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, security tools hadn't kept pace.

Existing solutions required installing agents on every server and generated floods of alerts that security teams couldn't process. The cloud was a mess of misconfigurations, exposed credentials, and hidden vulnerabilities — and nobody had a clear picture of it all.

Wiz launched in January 2020 — literally weeks before COVID-19 shut the world down. Instead of slowing them, the pandemic accelerated their market.

Every company on Earth was rushing to the cloud, and Wiz's agentless approach meant customers could deploy it in minutes with zero infrastructure changes. Connect your cloud account, and Wiz scans everything — VMs, containers, serverless functions, databases, identity configurations — building a complete risk map.

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.

Wiz

Wiz grew through a combination of product excellence and founder credibility. The four co-founders had already sold a company to Microsoft and led cloud security there.

When they said "we built a better way," CISOs believed them because of the track record.

The product sold itself through demonstrations. Wiz's 15-minute deployment — connect your cloud account, see your risk map immediately — was the most effective sales tool.

Security vendors typically require weeks or months of setup. Wiz showed results in a single meeting.

Landing massive logos early created a cascade. Within two years, Wiz had 40% of the Fortune 100 as customers.

When one CISO at a major bank buys Wiz, every other bank CISO hears about it. Enterprise security is a trust-based market, and early customer logos created a self-reinforcing credibility loop.

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.

Wiz

The Google acquisition decision dominated 2024. Wiz turned down Google's $23 billion offer in July 2024, with Rappaport saying they wanted to pursue an IPO and build an independent company.

Then they accepted a $32 billion offer later — the largest cybersecurity acquisition in history. The deal raised questions about cloud neutrality: Wiz secures AWS, Azure, and GCP equally, but becoming owned by Google could make AWS and Azure customers nervous.

Before the acquisition, the competitive landscape was intensifying. Palo Alto Networks acquired cloud security startups aggressively.

CrowdStrike expanded from endpoint security into cloud. AWS, Azure, and Google all improved their native security tools.

Wiz's lead was real but competitors were closing in.

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.

Wiz

Wiz Cloud Security Platform — the core product that provides agentless visibility across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Scans for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, malware, exposed secrets, and identity risks.

Wiz Runtime Sensor — a lightweight agent (optional) that adds real-time threat detection to the agentless scanning foundation. Wiz Code — security scanning integrated into the developer pipeline, catching vulnerabilities before they reach production.

Wiz Defend — a cloud detection and response product that identifies and helps contain active threats in real time. Wiz Security Graph — a visual map of an organization's entire cloud environment showing how every resource connects and where attack paths exist.

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.

Wiz

Sequoia Capital led early rounds and was the most prominent backer. Index Ventures, Insight Partners, and Greenoaks Capital participated in growth rounds.

Cyberstarts (an Israeli cyber-focused VC) was an early seed investor. Andreessen Horowitz invested in later rounds.

The final private valuation of $12 billion came in a 2024 funding round before the $32 billion Google acquisition.

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).