companies

NovelAI

Anime-flavored AI story writer and image generator built by a small, self-funded team obsessed with creative freedom.

Anlatan is the Delaware-based studio behind NovelAI, launched in beta in June 2021 as a subscription storytelling tool built directly on open large language models rather than as a wrapper around a general-purpose chatbot. The company has stayed privately owned and self-funded, growing on subscription revenue instead of venture capital, and is known in the AI writing community for shipping its own fine-tuned models rather than just prompting someone else's. Text generation and NovelAI Diffusion sit under one roof: Text handles long-form fiction, adventure-mode play, and lorebook-driven worldbuilding, while Diffusion focuses on anime and illustration-style image generation. Story data is encrypted client-side before it reaches the server, a privacy stance the company has marketed since day one. In October 2025, Anlatan rolled its GLM-4.6-based Xialong model out across every subscription tier, including the free trial, a jump that roughly quadrupled the usable context window overnight for many users.

Founded

2021

Headquarters

Wilmington, United States

Sector

applications