Captain Oyu likes thresholds. The instant a student raises a hand with the right answer. The moment a founder leaves a safe career before it begins. The second a stranger hears a song in another language and decides to sing along anyway. His latest threshold is one minute: the time AnotherBall says it should take to become a VTuber using Avvy. Behind that small promise sits a career of large revisions.
Shunsuke Oyu, known online as Oyu-san and in English as Captain, has built three companies in three different corners of the consumer internet. The first made a place for parents to exchange advice. The second managed English-speaking virtual performers. The third is trying to give anyone a hand-drawn alter ego and a stage. The industries changed. His question did not: can technology make it easier for people to find one another through something they love?
The boy who treated school like a game
Oyu was born in Hyogo Prefecture in 1988. His parents worked for a life insurer, so the family moved: Kawasaki through his early school years, then Kumagaya in Saitama. Kumon lessons arrived before memory properly did. Learn something early, teach it to classmates, receive their thanks. The loop made study feel social and, crucially, playable.
A teenage tutor sharpened that instinct. At cram-school camps, as many as 200 students churned through tests while the seating order changed with every result. Oyu remembers headbands, shouted promises to pass and the peculiar joy of total commitment. He followed the tutor to Keio Shiki Senior High School, a permissive place where students pursued their obsessions. His was chemistry. He wrote reports that ran to roughly 30 pages, carried a laptop when classmates used paper and recorded every lesson on a voice recorder. Efficiency had met fandom.
At Keio University he chose law because it mattered and he knew little about it. When the legal training system changed, he lost interest in the route and filled the space with international programs instead. He joined exchanges with students from China and Russia, served as Japan’s student foreign minister at the 2009 G8 Youth Summit and competed in OVAL, a Japan-China-Korea business contest. He did not yet speak confident English. That made the rooms harder and therefore more interesting.
The job he left before day one
Oyu accepted offers in strategy consulting, then negotiated a delayed start so he could spend a year in California. He studied religion because he wanted to understand how emotion shaped decisions across cultures. He tried entrepreneurship courses and later helped with due diligence at a government-linked investment fund near Washington, D.C. The year loosened his attachment to the tidy sequence he had been following. For the first time, the rails looked optional.
Back in Japan, a childhood friend introduced him to engineer Tatsuro Shimada. They had lunch. At their second meeting, over drinks at a pub, they argued through business models and soon applied to MOVIDA Japan, Taizo Son’s accelerator. The offer was abrupt: funding if they formed a company. Oyu judged entrepreneurship the more perishable option. Consulting would remain possible after a failure; the courage to start might not survive a comfortable salary.
Choose the option that expires
Oyu’s decision rule was not romance. He compared reversibility. A startup failure could still lead to employment, while employment might quietly close the startup window.
He declined the job, apologized in person after midnight and founded Connehito with Shimada in January 2012. The division of labor was almost comically clean: Shimada handled engineering; Oyu handled everything else. They had met only a few times, but came with a trusted reference and compatible operating habits. The bet has lasted across multiple companies.
Six misses, then Mamari
Connehito’s first product, Creatty, was an online gallery where makers could display work. It struggled to find a business model. So did the next ideas. Oyu has described two years without salary or days off and six product attempts that failed to connect. Mamari, launched in 2014, was the seventh.
Its advantage was not a grand technical invention. Rival parenting communities asked for detailed addresses during registration. Mamari let a person join with a nickname, ask a question and receive a kind answer without surrendering a room number. The reduction in friction changed the curve immediately. By 2016, the service and its related products had more than five million users. Connehito joined the KDDI group that June. By 2018, one in three women who gave birth in Japan had registered for Mamari.
Oyu handed the presidency to a new management team in 2019. His farewell note was emotional, funny and unusually attentive to succession. Three conditions had aligned: capable leaders were ready, the business was growing and the role the company required had changed. He trusted the new president in part because, as he wrote, he had never met anyone with a better afro. The joke carried a serious idea: a founder’s work can include leaving well.
Keep conviction one level above the product
Creatty and six other ideas could change because the underlying interest in useful online communities remained. A mission that survives a pivot is more valuable than a feature defended out of pride.
A common language at a concert
After Connehito, Oyu traveled. Shimada made a continuous round-the-world trip; Oyu moved between Japan and cities that caught his attention, often meeting entrepreneurs rather than sightseeing. At a concert in China, he saw virtual singers Luo Tianyi and Hatsune Miku perform together. A Chinese fan nearby shouted, “Miku-san, I love you” in Japanese. The fan did not speak Japanese. He had learned the sentence because devotion had given him a reason.
For Oyu, the exchange was a compact demonstration of culture crossing a boundary before politics or ordinary language could. He had already begun angel investing with proceeds from the Connehito sale, backing roughly 60 to 70 startups, including the company now called ANYCOLOR. The concert helped turn a market interest into a personal direction. Entertainment could be infrastructure for mutual understanding.
In January 2021 he founded PRISM Project, an English-language VTuber agency. His own English was still an effort, so he built an environment that offered no escape: talent interviews, staff conversations and daily operations all happened in English. The agency became profitable within six months. Yet the model depended on managing individual performers across time zones and cultural gaps. Sony Music Entertainment Japan acquired the project in May 2022.
Another ball enters the machine
Oyu named AnotherBall while reading Haruki Murakami’s Pinball, 1973. A second ball changes the state of the game. The company, established in May 2022, has lived up to that image by treating each product as a new play on the same board.
IZUMO explored characters, blockchain and new ways for creators to earn. It attracted artists and attention but encountered a mismatch between speculative crypto behavior and creative culture. AniLive followed in February 2024 as a North America-focused VTuber streaming app. It found paying audiences, yet avatar production remained painfully manual. Even a practiced team needed months to draw and rig a character.
Then an AniLive promotion offered avatars to prospective streamers. Applications flooded in. The constraint was suddenly legible: people wanted to become VTubers faster than any studio could manufacture custom identities. AnotherBall cut staff tied to the old model, gave the next team a stark target and built Avvy.
Avvy preserves the hand of an illustrator while turning creation into assembly. Artists draw eyes, clothes, hair and accessories. Users combine the parts into more than 10 million possible avatars, animate a face through a smartphone camera and can stream inside or outside the app. The company chose this modular craft approach while generated imagery was capturing attention elsewhere. The texture of human authorship became a product decision.
Three signals that Avvy found an opening
Beta registrations and user-generated posts are from April 2025. Overseas share was reported with the May 2026 financing announcement. Bar lengths show relative scale within each measure, not a shared unit.
The beta passed 200,000 registrations in 10 days in April 2025, without paid promotion. The official version arrived in June. By May 2026, overseas users represented more than half the base. Four Japanese banks provided ¥2.5 billion in debt financing, bringing AnotherBall’s disclosed cumulative funding to ¥4.7 billion. In August, Tokyo selected the company for its SusHi Tech Global Startups program.
Can VTubers travel like sushi?
Oyu’s preferred analogy is sushi: a Japanese form that traveled, adapted and acquired local dialects such as the California roll. He wants VTubers to do the same. The ambition is not simply to export finished Japanese characters. Avvy distributes the means of becoming a character, which allows creators elsewhere to invent their own local versions.
He has also argued that VTubers deserve a place beside anime, games, manga, film and music in Japan’s cultural strategy. The claim combines policy with a fan’s intuition. Artificial intelligence can make production faster, but Oyu believes the scarce input will remain mōsōryoku, which AnotherBall renders as wild imagination: an obsessive willingness to build a world from nothing and invite other people inside.
There is a useful humility buried in the grand thesis. Oyu’s career does not show a founder predicting the right product three times. It shows someone noticing where people gather, lowering the threshold and revising the machinery. Mamari removed an address form. Avvy compresses months of avatar work into minutes. In each case, participation becomes easier without making the underlying human desire any smaller.
Captain is an audacious nickname for a founder fond of changing vessels. Yet it fits. A captain’s loyalty is to the destination, not the plank beneath his feet. Oyu’s destination has stayed visible since that concert in China: a place where enthusiasm arrives first, translation catches up and strangers discover that they have already begun to understand one another.