Describe an app. Get a playable one in seconds. Then let a few million people remix it.
Sunnyvale, California, 2026. A 512-pixel app icon standing in for a company that would rather you not notice the software at all - only the thing you just made with it. The founder calls it "the next format." Everyone else calls it fun.
Here is a fact that sounds made up: on Sekai, a new piece of software gets built roughly every half-second, and almost none of the people building it can code. They type a sentence - "a game where my cat dodges Mondays," "a quiz that ranks my friends by chaos" - and a few seconds later there is an app. Playable. Shareable. Real enough that someone else will tap "remix" and make it theirs.
This is the whole idea, and it is worth pausing on how strange it is. For about seventy years, "making software" meant knowing how to make software. The barrier was the point; it was what separated the people who could build from the people who could only ask. Sekai's bet is that generative AI has quietly deleted that barrier, and that the interesting question is no longer "can a machine write code" - obviously it can now - but "what do millions of ordinary people build the moment it costs them nothing but a sentence?"
The answer, so far, is: fifteen million mini-apps. Not enterprise dashboards. Games, polls, quizzes, tiny utilities, interactive stories - the digital equivalent of doodling, except the doodles run. Users create about 200,000 new ones a day and spend, on average, more than an hour inside the app. If you squint, it looks less like a developer tool and more like a social feed where the posts happen to be executable.
Sekai - the word is Japanese for "world" - did not start here. It began in 2024 as an AI anime fan-fiction app, a place to build generative story worlds. Then the underlying coding models got dramatically better, and the founder did the uncomfortable, correct thing: he let the original product shrink into a feature of a much larger one. The stories are still there. But the mission grew up around them.
“AI-generated software is the next format, and Sekai is where anyone can create, play, and remix software.”
- Lucky Zhang, Founder & CEODescribe an app - a game, a quiz, a utility, a poll, an interactive story - in plain language. Sekai's AI turns the prompt into a working, playable mini-app in seconds. No code, no setup.
Browse and play what other people have made. Because the barrier to creation is a sentence, the catalog grows by 200,000 apps a day, and the good ones surface by getting played and remixed.
See something you like? Remix it. Editing someone else's app is easier than starting from a blank prompt, so most creation on Sekai is really collaborative iteration - the community building on itself.
The AI-coding space is crowded. Replit, Lovable, Bolt, Base44, Google's app builders - a whole industry is racing to help engineers, and engineer-adjacent people, ship software faster. Sekai points its product the other way. Its customer is the person who never wanted to be a developer and never will: the teenager on the bus, the friend who is "not a tech person," the doodler. That is a different, and much larger, audience.
The mechanic that makes it work is the remix. On most creation platforms, the blank prompt is the villain - staring at an empty box is where enthusiasm goes to die. Sekai sidesteps it by making everything forkable. You rarely start from nothing; you start from someone else's app and bend it toward what you meant. Creation becomes editing, and editing is far less scary. It is the same trick that made Roblox and TikTok's duets and every meme template work, applied to software itself.
There is also a founder pattern worth noticing. Sekai is Lucky Zhang's fourth company. His first was acquired by Apple. His second - Latin America's largest short-video platform - was acquired by TikTok's parent, ByteDance. His third still runs Vietnam's largest music-streaming service. The through-line is products where the user does the creative work and the software gets out of the way. Sekai is that thesis, turned up to the level of software itself.
| Round | Amount | When | Lead & Notable Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | ~$6M | 2024-25 | Mayfield (Navin Chaddha), a16z speedrun, A*, MVP Ventures |
| Series A | $20M | Jun 2026 | Khosla Ventures (Keith Rabois) & Connect Ventures (Nicole Quinn), 359 Capital, Parable VC, 645 Ventures |
| Total | ~$26M | — | Backed toward creator partnerships and platform scale |
Connect Ventures is a joint firm founded by CAA and NEA - the thread behind Sekai's creator and celebrity partnerships with Creative Artists Agency.
Bars scaled for legibility, not to a common axis. Figures approximate, per company disclosures, mid-2026.
Lucky Zhang launches Sekai in the SF Bay Area as an AI storytelling and anime fan-fiction app.
As AI coding models improve, Sekai expands from stories into general-purpose prompt-to-app creation and adds one-tap remixing.
Users pass 15 million created apps, ~200,000 a day, roughly one new app every half-second.
A $20M Series A co-led by Khosla Ventures and Connect Ventures brings total funding to about $26M, alongside a creator partnership with CAA.
Sekai is a mobile app where anyone can create a playable, shareable mini-app - a game, quiz, tool or interactive story - just by describing it in a text prompt, then play and remix apps made by others.
Sekai was founded in 2024 by Lucky Zhang, a serial entrepreneur whose previous companies were acquired by Apple and by TikTok's parent, ByteDance.
About $26 million across Seed and Series A rounds, including a $20 million Series A announced in June 2026 co-led by Khosla Ventures and Connect Ventures.
Users have created more than 15 million mini-apps, with roughly 200,000 new ones every day and over an hour of average daily usage, as of mid-2026.
“Sekai” is the Japanese word for “world” - a nod to the app's origins building interactive anime story worlds before it expanded into general app creation.