Shopee
Shopee is a Southeast Asian e-commerce platform founded in 2015 by Li Xiaodong (李小冬), the Singapore-based Chinese entrepreneur who also built the gaming company Garena . It operates as a subsidiary of Sea Limited (冬海集团), the NYSE-listed parent company that combines both businesses . Within five years of launch, Shopee became the leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, a region where it benefited from the same digital economy wave that produced rivals like Lazada and enabled logistics players such as J&T Express to scale .
Shopee's rise was part of a broader shift that made "going global" a mainstream investment theme among Chinese VCs. By 2020, it ranked among the top three shopping apps globally by downloads, and Sea Limited's market capitalization briefly approached $200 billion in October 2021—making it Asia's third-largest internet company at the time . The platform has since served as a key channel for Chinese consumer brands entering Southeast Asia, including beauty labels like Perfect Diary and Colorkey .
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Coverage
A Conversation with Thailand's First Unicorn Founder: From Orphan to $3 Billion CEO --- When Kavin Bhumikittikul was six years old, he watched his mother walk out the door and never come back. His father, a gambling addict, had accumulated crushing debts. The family shattered. Kavin and his siblings were sent to separate orphanages across Bangkok. Forty years later, he is the founder and CEO of Agoda, the online travel platform valued at roughly $3 billion — Thailand's first unicorn, and one of Southeast Asia's most consequential tech companies. I met Kavin at Agoda's Bangkok headquarters, a sleek glass tower overlooking the Chao Phraya River. He arrived without an entourage, wearing a company polo shirt and carrying his own laptop bag. The contrast between his current stature and his origins is almost too stark to process. Yet he speaks about both with the same even, analytical tone — as if describing data points in a business case rather than his own life. --- **"I learned to sell before I learned to read properly"** Kavin's earliest memory of commerce is selling candy to other children at his orphanage, age seven. He would buy bulk packs with his meager allowance
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