Gen Fukunaga

In 2005, Funimation was acquired by the Navarre Corporation for US$100.4 million, Fukunaga still remained the company's CEO. In 2011, the company was sold to a group of investors which included Fukunaga himself. In 2017, Funimation was sold to Sony Pictures Television Networks for US$143 million.

Originally, Toei Animation told Funimation that they could not have the Dragon Ball series. However, Fukunaga's uncle, Nagafumi Hori, was one of the producers for Toei Company and helped him convince Toei Animation to give the license to Funimation. So Fukunaga went to a coworker named Daniel Cocanougher, whose family owned a feed mill in Decatur, Texas, and convinced the Cocanougher family to sell their business and invest in creating a production company. With that, FUNimation Productions was established in 1994.

Fukunaga attended Purdue University where he got his BSEE in 1982 and his MSEE in 1984. He later moved to Boca Raton, Florida to work as an engineer for IBM. He then attended Columbia Business School, obtaining an MBA in 1989. He held a position with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) before getting a job with Tandem Computers in Sunnyvale, California.

Fukunaga was born in Itami, Hyōgo, Japan, and grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana in the United States. He graduated from West Lafayette High School in 1979.

Gen Fukunaga or Eugene Fukunaga (福永 元 or ユージーン・フクナガ , Fukunaga Gen, born 22 March 1962) is a Japanese–American engineer and businessman. He established Funimation and currently serves as its president, a company that distributes anime in Canada and the United States. As of October 2011, Fukunaga was named chairman of online video game publisher GameSamba.