Gen Fukunaga

Gen Fukunaga (福永 元) is a Japanese-born 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.

Biography
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.

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 is also the co-founder and manager of EchoLight Studios, a Texas-based Christian television production company ran by Rick Santorum. EchoLight initially shared office space with Fukunaga's Funimation.

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 and helped Fukunaga convince Toei Animation to give the licence to Funimation. So Gen 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.

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.

Personal life
Fukunaga is married to Cindy Brennan, who also was a co-founder and former executive producer at Funimation. They have three children.