Nijisanji launched in 2018 under the company later renamed ANYCOLOR

The setup

Nijisanji is a VTuber and virtual liver project that began operating in early 2018, run by a company that has changed its public name since: it operated as Ichikara Inc. through most of Nijisanji's growth, then renamed itself ANYCOLOR Inc. in 2021. The company's own archived website — captured by the Internet Archive on 8 February 2018 — already listed dedicated site sections for a Nijisanji smartphone app, an official-character showcase, and talent auditions, showing the project was operating under that name by that date.

What the documents show

YouTube's own record for the official Nijisanji channel shows it was created on 30 January 2018, ahead of the February site snapshot, consistent with a channel being registered slightly before a company's promotional pages catch up rather than contradicting an early-2018 launch. As retrieved on 16 September 2026, that channel describes roughly 150 affiliated virtual livers active across video platforms, a current figure that should not be read back onto the 2018 roster. Separately, the company's own 2021 rebranding announcement states plainly that its former company name, Ichikara, was being replaced by ANYCOLOR, and that the company had been operating continuously since its May 2017 founding — directly naming Ichikara, not any other identifier, as the pre-rebrand company. This entry relies on that self-identification rather than on secondary retrospectives that use a different former name for the same company.

The craft

What Ichikara's own 2018 site pages document is a company treating an app, a character roster, and an audition pipeline as coordinated launch components rather than one single announcement, a structure worth noting for anyone studying how a talent agency stands up a new brand. The audition pipeline in particular previews a recruitment-first model that Nijisanji has run continuously since, expanding into multiple countries under the same company.

Keeping the creator in control

None of the documents opened for this entry name specific 2018-era talents or describe any performer's identity; they describe the company, the app, and the audition process. This entry keeps to that boundary and does not speculate about who held any of Nijisanji's earliest roles.

• What does an audition-based recruitment pipeline, documented from launch, tell a prospective creator about an agency's model?
• How do a channel's registration date and a company's own site content corroborate or complicate a launch-date claim?
• What should change in how you cite a company's history once it has renamed itself more than once?

Nijisanji's early-2018 launch is documented by the operating company's own archived pages and by the platform record of its official channel, and both agree on a company that called itself Ichikara at the time — a detail worth keeping straight given how often the project's corporate parent has been renamed since.