History
The company was founded in 1994 by Japanese-born businessman Gen Fukunaga. Fukunaga's uncle was one of the producers for the popular anime series Dragon Ball; he approached Gen about bringing the series over to America. He proposed that if Fukunaga could start a production company and raise enough money, Toei Animation would license the rights to the show. Fukunaga met with co-worker Daniel Cocanougher whose family owned a feed mill in Decatur, Texas and convinced Cocanougher's family to sell their business and serve as an investor for his company. The company was originally formed in Silicon Valley, California as Funimation Productions in 1994, but eventually relocated to Fort Worth, Texas. By 1998, after two failed attempts to bring the Dragon Ball franchise to a U.S. audience, it finally found success on Cartoon Network's action-oriented programming block Toonami, and the Dragon Ball phenomenon quickly grew in the United States as it had elsewhere. This led Funimation to begin licensing other anime to the U.S.
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