Company history

In May 2017 Tasumi Riku, twenty-one and still enrolled at Waseda University, registered Ichikara Inc. in Shinjuku, Tokyo, with $8,916 (¥1m) of capital and one employee — himself. The business was applications for VR and MR headsets, entered at the peak of what Japan then called the first year of VR. Six months later the head office moved to Shibuya, the country’s startup district, and by January 2018 the company had announced something else entirely: Nijisanji, a group of VTubers — performers who appear as animated avatars — and an open call for talent.

The pivot was total. Less than a year after founding, Ichikara put down the software it had meant to sell and became a talent agency, and the numbers moved with it: standalone revenue of ¥16 million in the year to April 2018, the last period before the switch, became ¥866 million the following year. Eight performers debuted in February 2018 into an industry where VTubers still worked alone; Ichikara supplied what individuals could not — recruitment, streaming operations, merchandise, rights and, soon, foreign markets — and stacked commerce and paid membership on top of streaming revenue.

Then came a rhythm the company would repeat for years: expand, then consolidate. Sub-groups for game streamers and for trainees launched in May and June 2018 — and were folded back into a single Nijisanji brand that December, six months later. Overseas the same pattern ran wider. Between April and December 2019, Ichikara stood up local VTuber groups for China, Indonesia, India and South Korea, each cast from its own market, making it the first agency in the industry to operate as a multi-region network rather than a Japanese label with foreign fans.

Between March and October 2020 the company assembled the revenue structure it still runs on. It opened an English-language channel, launched an official online store for merchandise, and started a paid fan-club subscription — so that streaming income (tips and channel memberships) sat alongside commerce, recurring fees and live events. The pandemic then supplied demand at a scale no plan had assumed: revenue rose from ¥3,479 million in the year to April 2020 to ¥7,636 million a year later, and an operating result of essentially nothing became an operating profit of ¥1,452 million — a margin near 19%, and the first proof that the combination, not any one line, was what made the model profitable.

In 2021 the company chose its markets and its name. The Indian group was suspended in April, concentrating resources on the English-speaking world, Southeast Asia and China; in May, Ichikara became Anycolor — a name meant to describe a place where performers of any colour gather rather than the starting point of one man’s business — and NIJISANJI EN began. A training programme for new talent followed in June, an in-house pipeline built precisely because competition for performers was intensifying. Revenue for the year to April 2022 reached ¥14,164 million, up 85.5%, with operating profit of ¥4,191 million.

Anycolor listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market in June 2022, five years and one month after its founding, against a median of more than a decade for that market. Shares offered at ¥1,530 opened at ¥7,150 — 4.67 times the offer price — and market capitalization briefly passed ¥200 billion before the stock halved within six months. Tasumi, who had held 46.86% of the company going into the offering, sold little: the listing was designed to give early venture backers an exit and the performers a visible long-term footing, not to disperse control.

One year after listing, in June 2023, Anycolor moved up to the Prime Market — an unusually fast reclassification that required clearing free-float thresholds and the stricter Prime governance code at once. Institutional money followed: trust banks entered the register alongside Sony Music Entertainment, while Tasumi still held 43.88% as of April 2025. Growth did not slow with the promotion. Revenue ran ¥25,341 million (up 78.9%) for the year to April 2023, ¥31,995 million, then ¥42,876 million for the year to April 2025, with operating margins holding between 37% and 39% — three consecutive years above 25% growth, and revenue three times the level of its first year as a public company.

The governance around that growth is deliberately lopsided in age. The three inside directors — Tasumi as CEO, born 1996; the CFO Tsurui Shinya, from PwC and Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley; and Suzuki Takato, from the game industry — were all in their thirties, and are reviewed by five outside directors and audit-committee members drawn from law, accounting, internal audit and finance. It is a young owner-operator core braced by senior outside scrutiny, a structure assembled in eight years and built to hold once the founding venture funds had gone.

The strategic question since 2023 has been concentration. Having narrowed its overseas footprint to the English-speaking world and China, Anycolor now finds that the monetization pace of NIJISANJI EN — competing directly with rivals in a market where fan bases build differently — reads as the state of its entire international business. Domestically it has moved from running Nijisanji as one large roster to operating multiple units with distinct characters, beginning with the four-man VOLTACTION, so that no single cluster of popular performers carries the revenue. Talent competition, dependence on YouTube as a distribution platform, and the gap between a short-term valuation and a long-term business remain the open items.