anime
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42West Fandoms & Franchises knows who waits in line
From collectible figures to horror films, 42West’s Fandoms & Franchises division works where affection becomes a purchase. Its real subject is the fan who already cares.
DMM Quit Robots. Now It’s Putting ¥5 Billion Into a Return.
Anime, currency trading, English lessons and an aquarium already share the DMM name. Its return to robotics reveals how this Japanese conglomerate decides which failures deserve another chance.
Sony’s Quiet Trick: Own the Camera, the Console and What Plays on Both
Sony spent decades assembling a strange collection of consoles, cameras, songs, films and sensors. Now the collection is becoming a system - and its smartest lesson is knowing when the pieces truly reinforce one another.
AnotherBall Bet $30 Million That Your Next Face Will Be a Cartoon
The Tokyo startup turned a costly creator ritual into a one-minute phone trick. Now it has $30 million in cumulative backing, an anime studio and the harder job of proving that 200,000 curious sign-ups can become a lasting global economy.
FUN.com
FUN.com is a North Mankato, Minnesota-based online retailer of costumes, pop-culture merchandise, collectibles, toys, party supplies and seasonal decor. It is the parent brand of HalloweenCostumes.com, the largest online-only costume retailer in the world. Grown from a family costume-rental shop that opened in a Minnesota garage in 1992, the company now designs and manufactures thousands of its own exclusive, officially licensed costumes and animatronics in-house and ships them to customers across North America, Europe and Australia.
Sekai
Sekai is a San Francisco Bay Area consumer platform where anyone can build software just by describing it. Users type a prompt and get a playable, shareable mini-app - a game, quiz, utility, poll or interactive story - in seconds, then play, remix and share what others make. Founded in 2024 by serial entrepreneur Lucky Zhang, Sekai (Japanese for 'world') began as an AI anime fan-fiction tool and pivoted into general-purpose app creation as AI coding models improved. By mid-2026 users had created more than 15 million mini-apps, with roughly 200,000 new ones a day, and the company had raised about $26 million across Seed and Series A rounds from Khosla Ventures, Connect Ventures, a16z speedrun, Mayfield and others.
Spellbrush
Spellbrush is a San Francisco generative AI studio building anime games and AI tools for artists. The team behind niji・journey - the anime model co-developed with Midjourney - and games like Arrowmancer, Cake Duel, and Waifu Labs. A Y Combinator W18 alum led by Cory Li, focused on using deep learning to help human artists create high-quality anime visuals.
Nina Perez
Nina Perez is the founder of Project Fandom, an entertainment news and podcast platform she launched in 2009 that covers TV, movies, gaming, comics, anime, and books from a geek's perspective. Dubbed 'The Oprah of MySpace' for her uncanny ability to get readers hooked on almost anything, she is also a published author with three series under her belt, a Social Media Community Manager by day, and a lifelong Brooklynite who now calls Portland, Oregon home.
Cory Li
Cory Li is the CEO and co-founder of Spellbrush, the San Francisco-based generative AI studio behind niji-journey - the world's leading AI anime art platform built in collaboration with Midjourney. A MIT-trained bioengineer turned AI entrepreneur, Li previously co-founded Benchling (YC S12), the biotech R&D platform that went on to become a unicorn. At Spellbrush (YC W18), he leads a 31-person team building AI-powered anime games and creative tools - from WaifuLabs' anime portrait generator to Arrowmancer, an anime RPG where players design characters using generative AI, to niji-journey's mobile app with millions of users.
Kun Gao
Kun Gao is a serial entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and original CEO of Crunchyroll, the platform that turned anime from a niche US curiosity into a billion-dollar streaming giant (acquired by Sony/AT&T WarnerMedia for $1.2 billion). Now he's doing it again as Co-Founder and CEO of Forge (forge.gg), a San Francisco-based game marketing and loyalty platform that hit 1 million users within its first year. Alongside co-founders Dennis 'Thresh' Fong (the world's first professional esports player) and George Ng, Gao is building the infrastructure layer that indie game developers desperately need: no-code loyalty programs, player analytics, and direct community channels - without the walled gardens.
Jonathan Lai
Jonathan Lai is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) where he leads the Speedrun investment program and the Games vertical. A Harvard-trained economist turned product manager turned VC, he built his career arc through Morgan Stanley's investment banking floors, Riot Games' League of Legends product team, Dots (acquired by Take-Two for $192M), and Tencent's North America investments desk before landing at a16z. His investment thesis sits at the intersection of AI and creative technology - believing that the same retention-loop design principles that made League of Legends the world's most-played PC game are now reshaping enterprise software, fintech, and the next generation of AI-native consumer apps.