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.