aid: actevolve name: ActEvolve description: >- ActEvolve Inc. (株式会社ActEvolve) was a Tokyo virtual-reality entertainment company incorporated on 9 August 2017 by Takuya Kato, a former Capcom game developer, together with other ex-game-industry engineers. In November 2018 it launched VARK, a VR live platform on which VTuber and virtual-artist performances — most visibly the long-running "Cinderella switch" series with hololive — were staged as ticketed, seat-based concerts for Meta Quest, Android and iOS, paid for with in-app VARK Coin. The company took strategic investment from KLab Inc. in August 2019, renamed itself VARK Inc. (株式会社VARK) on 1 May 2020 alongside a roughly ¥200M round from ANRI, raised a further ¥600M in May 2021, and diversified into the VARK SHORTS 3D animation tool and the STAR BLOOM liver-management agency, producing metaverse events for ANYCOLOR, Avex, KADOKAWA, COVER, Dwango, Shochiku and Meta. VARK was a consumer entertainment app rather than a platform business: it never operated a developer program, and no public API, SDK, webhook catalogue or machine-readable specification (OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, GraphQL SDL, MCP manifest, agent card) was published on any of its hosts at any point — 1,812 archived URLs across vark.co.jp and its subdomains contain no /api, /developers, /docs, /openapi or /graphql path of any kind. The VARK metaverse service shut down on 4 March 2024 with same-day notice, refunding unused VARK Coin until 5 May 2024 under Japan's Payment Services Act; the free tier of VARK SHORTS ended on 30 September 2024; and in March 2025 the entire company was sold in an all-share transaction whose acquirer and terms were kept confidential, with founder Takuya Kato stepping down as representative director. This profile is retained as a historical record — there is no API surface to enrich. url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/actevolve/refs/heads/main/apis.yml image: https://web.archive.org/web/20250209054433id_/https://corp.vark.co.jp/wp-content/themes/vark/assets/images/common/logo.svg x-image-note: >- The company logo is served only from the Wayback Machine's 2025-02-09 capture of the now-offline corporate site; the live origin publishes no address record. Verified 2026-09-06: HTTP 200, image/svg+xml, 32,782 bytes. x-type: company x-source: harvest:secondary-market x-harvest-source-url: https://equityzen.com/company/actevolve/ x-tier: stub x-tier-reason: defunct-no-api-surface x-status: defunct x-founded: '2017-08-09' x-renamed: date: '2020-05-01' from: 株式会社ActEvolve (ActEvolve Inc.) to: 株式会社VARK (VARK Inc.) source: https://corp.vark.co.jp/company x-shutdown-date: '2024-03-04' x-shutdown-note: >- The VARK entertainment-metaverse service was announced and terminated the same day, 4 March 2024, with unused VARK Coin refundable until 5 May 2024 under Japan's Payment Services Act. VARK SHORTS lost its free tier on 30 September 2024. In March 2025 all shares in the company were transferred to an undisclosed buyer and the founder stepped down; the surviving entity says it will pursue new service development and consulting. x-domain-status: offline x-domain-note: >- vark.co.jp is still registered to 株式会社VARK at JPRS (created 2018-09-10, Connected through 2026-09-30, record last updated 2025-10-17) and actevolve.com is still registered via GoDaddy on Route 53 name servers (created 2017-05-31, expiring 2027-05-31), but neither zone publishes an A, AAAA or CNAME record for any web hostname — authoritative queries return NOERROR/NODATA and curl exits 6 on every request. The vark.co.jp SOA serial decodes to 2025-03-06, the month the sale closed, and the only surviving record is an MX pointing at Google Workspace. corp.vark.co.jp (the corporate site) was last captured by the Wayback Machine on 2025-02-09. No host is wired as a Website pointer because none of them serves anything, and the EquityZen page this company was harvested from is a trading venue's listing, not a company web presence (roadmap#56). specificationVersion: '0.20' created: '2026-09-06' modified: '2026-09-06' tags: - Company - Defunct - Acquired - Virtual Reality - Metaverse - Entertainment - Live Events - VTuber - Consumer - Japan tags_raw: - Company - Defunct - Acquired - Virtual Reality - Metaverse - Entertainment - Live Events - VTuber - Consumer - Japan apis: [] maintainers: - FN: Kin Lane email: kin@apievangelist.com - FN: APIs.json email: info@apis.io common: [] x-coverage: state: none reason: defunct detail: >- ActEvolve/VARK shut its VR platform down on 4 March 2024 and was sold outright in March 2025; vark.co.jp, corp.vark.co.jp and actevolve.com are all still registered to the company but publish no A/AAAA/CNAME record, so curl exits 6 ("could not resolve host") before any HTTP request can be made, and 1,812 archived URLs from when the sites were live contain no /api, /developers or specification path of any kind. evidence: - url: https://vark.co.jp/ status: 0 - url: https://corp.vark.co.jp/company status: 0 - url: https://actevolve.com/ status: 0 - url: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.actevolve.vrpf_sp status: 404 - url: https://pypi.org/pypi/actevolve/json status: 404 - url: https://registry.npmjs.org/-/v1/search?text=actevolve status: 200 - url: https://equityzen.com/company/actevolve/ status: 200 checked: '2026-09-06' x-enrichment: date: '2026-09-06' status: nochange artifacts_added: 1 pass: local-v3