Funimation

Gen Fukunaga was born in Japan and watched anime as a boy, then worked as an engineer at IBM and a product manager at Tandem Computers in Silicon Valley. In 1994 he started Funimation with Daniel Cocanougher, a former IBM coworker who helped run his family's animal-feed business in Decatur, Texas. Through an uncle who was a director and producer at Toei Animation, Fukunaga licensed Dragon Ball Z. People in Hollywood told him American children would not watch foreign cartoons.

To get the show on American television, Funimation had to edit the episodes for U.S. children's standards and record English voices. The dubbing was done briefly in Hollywood and Vancouver before the company brought it to its own headquarters in North Texas. Dragon Ball Z went into syndication in 1996 and ranked in the top 5 percent of syndicated children's shows. Cartoon Network picked it up in August 1998, and within six months it was the channel's top show.

In January 2000 the Dallas Observer visited the company's offices, two floors of a bank building on Loop 820 in Fort Worth. Casting and voice director Chris Sabat was recording episodes in a makeshift booth. Much of the staff were University of North Texas students or Denton residents: audio engineers, the script supervisor, the website manager and much of the voice cast. The paper put the show's audience at nearly two million viewers. Home video grew to 80 percent of revenue, and the company reached $65 million in revenue within a few years, which paid for more licenses, including shows for Adult Swim.

Navarre Corp. bought Funimation in 2005 for $128 million. Cocanougher left, and Fukunaga stayed as president. Fukunaga later told D CEO the deal had not worked for Funimation. In 2011 he and a group of investors, chairman John A. Kuelbs and the Dallas investors Darwin and Doug Deason, bought the company back for $24 million. By 2017 Funimation was based in Flower Mound, had more than 200 employees and over $100 million a year in revenue, and was releasing Dragon Ball Super, Attack on Titan and the feature Your Name. It also ran the FunimationNOW streaming service. That July, Sony Pictures Television Networks agreed to buy a majority stake in a deal that valued the company at about $150 million. Fukunaga remained CEO.

In August 2021, Sony's Funimation Global Group closed its $1.175 billion purchase of Crunchyroll from AT&T. Sony then moved its anime business under the Crunchyroll name. Funimation titles began moving to Crunchyroll with the spring 2022 season. On April 2, 2024, the Funimation app shut down and its accounts merged into Crunchyroll.