YesPress · Jun 2026
Profile covering Spellbrush’s founding, team, products, and partnership with Midjourney; cites niji・journey as flagship product and describes the studio’s anime-focused AI and game work.
Company research
Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals
Updated Aug 16, 2026
Overview
Spellbrush is a San Francisco-based computer games and generative AI studio best known for niji・journey, an anime-focused image generation product built with Midjourney. The company also develops anime/game projects and AI tooling for game production.
Primary product
niji・journey
Founded
2018
Headquarters
San Francisco, California, United States
Team size
11-50
Industry
Computer Games
Sub-industry
Generative AI for anime/art and game development
Offices
Japan
Business model
B2C subscription
B2B partnership/licensing
game development
Funding
Stage
seed
Total raised
$245K
Latest round
Seed · Aug 2018
Latest amount
$120K
Aug 2018
People & investors
Leadership
Cory Li
CEO
Ruwen Liu
Co-Founder
Haitao Mao
Co-Founder, Gamedev
Jennifer Lai
CFO
Work & culture
Public materials emphasize a strong anime/game aesthetic, research-driven experimentation, and a no-compromise approach to gameplay and visual art. Hiring pages show active recruiting across AI research, infrastructure, and game development.
Product & market
Pricing
niji・journey appears to use subscription tiers; public details are limited.
Differentiators
- —Anime-specialized generative model/product
- —Partnership with Midjourney
- —Focus on high-quality anime aesthetics and character consistency
- —Combination of AI research and game development
- —Strong emphasis on visual art and turn-based tactics game design
Technology
Unity
React
React Native
Node.js
Python
TypeScript
PyTorch
Linux
Grafana
Prometheus
Slurm
Ceph
Weka
Redis
GitHub
Blender
Unreal Engine
Figma
Slack
Customers
niji・journey users
anime artists
illustrators
indie game developers
Midjourney (partner)
Competitors
Midjourney
Stable Diffusion-based image tools
other anime image generation tools
game-asset generation startups
Scale & contact
Estimated revenue
~$0.5M-$1M annually (public estimate from Exa: ~$800K)
Estimated monthly visits
6.4K
Traffic estimate as of Jun 2026
Latest news
Kotaku · May 2026
Kotaku covered Spellbrush's upcoming tactical SRPG, described as a pixel-art strategy game about reclaiming lost colors and restoring glory.
Jennifer Lai on LinkedIn · Jan 2026
Jennifer Lai announced Niji 7, highlighting multimodal generation, better coherence, improved text rendering, and stronger style-reference handling for anime video generation.
CGWORLD.jp · Jul 2025
Reports the release of Niji Video as a new video-generation feature for niji・journey, developed by Midjourney and Spellbrush.
Built In
Company page with public-facing culture and careers information.
Jobs and careers at Spellbrush
11 jobs at Spellbrush
HPC/ML Infrastructure Engineer
On-site
Research Team
San Francisco or Tokyo
3mo ago
On-site
Full-time
3D Game Programmer (Unity)
Remote
Research Team
San Francisco or Tokyo
1y ago
Remote
Full-time
AI Anime Researcher - LLM
On-site
Research Team
San Francisco or Tokyo
1y ago
On-site
Full-time
AI Anime Researcher - Motion Generation Models
On-site
Research Team
San Francisco or Tokyo
1y ago
On-site
Full-time
バックオフィス マネージャー
On-site
Operations Team
Tokyo
1y ago
On-site
Full-time
Level Designer
On-site
Games Team
San Francisco or Tokyo
1y ago
On-site
Full-time
Game Programmer (Unity)
On-site
Games Team
San Francisco
1y ago
On-site
Full-time
Software Engineer
On-site
Research Team
San Francisco
1y ago
On-site
Full-time
AI Anime Researcher
On-site
Research Team
Tokyo
2y ago
On-site
Full-time
AI Infrastructure Engineer
On-site
Research Team
San Francisco
2y ago
On-site
Full-time
Front-End Engineer (Anime)
On-site
Games Team
San Francisco
2y ago
On-site
Full-time