Kun Gao is positioning AniBiz as a game-changer for the anime industry—a one-stop B2B platform that streamlines licensing deals between IP holders like Aniplex and Toei Animation and global distributors. Nakama frames it as democratizing access to premium anime content while building sustainable infrastructure for an increasingly fragmented marketplace.
Insiders are watching closely whether Gao can pull this off given Crunchyroll's complicated legacy—the platform was sold to Sony in a deal that valued it at $1.175 billion, and some industry veterans question whether the B2B licensing model can compete with established intermediaries who've controlled these relationships for decades.
AniBiz launched July 2, 2026 via Gao's Nakama company; Variety reported the exclusive news. Crunchyroll was acquired by Sony in 2021 in a deal reportedly valued at $1.175 billion. The platform already counts Aniplex and Toei Animation among its founding IP partners.
Kun Gao built Crunchyroll from a fan project into a streaming empire—now he's betting that the real money in anime isn't in subscriptions, but in being the middleman who takes a cut of every licensing deal worldwide. Whether this is genius or hubris depends entirely on whether the major studios actually commit.
KUN GAO IS BACK IN THE GAME, and this time he's not competing with Netflix—he's trying to own the entire backend of the anime industry. The Crunchyroll co-founder and former CEO launched AniBiz.com Thursday through his media company Nakama, positioning it as what Variety reports is "the first dedicated B2B marketplace built specifically for the global anime industry." The platform aims to connect IP holders—studios like Aniplex and Toei Animation—with distributors and licensees in one centralized digital hub.
Gao, who co-founded both Crunchyroll and Nakama, is betting that anime's explosive growth has outpaced the clunky, relationship-driven licensing infrastructure that's traditionally governed these deals. Let's be clear about what happened to get us here: Gao helped build Crunchyroll into a streaming juggernaut with over 10 million subscribers at its peak, then watched Sony acquire it in 2021 for what sources reported as $1.175 billion. That exit made him very wealthy and gave him the freedom to think bigger—or some might say more recklessly—about where anime's future lies.
Now he's arguing that the real bottleneck isn't content or viewers, it's the labyrinthine process of getting deals done across multiple territories and platforms. The timing is interesting, if calculated: AniBiz arrives as the anime licensing market faces unprecedented fragmentation. With streaming wars intensifying between Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HIDIVE, and regional players across Asia and Europe, IP holders have more suitors than ever but fewer standardized ways to evaluate offers, manage multi-territory deals, or track revenue sharing.
Gao is essentially proposing to build the Bloomberg Terminal for anime licensing—except instead of tracking bond prices, his platform would aggregate availability windows, royalty structures, and territorial restrictions across thousands of titles. Industry observers are skeptical but intrigued. "The problem he's identifying is real," one veteran anime distributor told Celebrity Bytes, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"But the studios—especially Toei and Aniplex—have spent decades cultivating direct relationships with buyers. They're not going to surrender that control overnight just because there's a shiny new platform." The question isn't whether Gao identified a genuine inefficiency; it's whether he can convince the gatekeepers who've benefited from information asymmetry to actually use his marketplace. AniBiz's success will ultimately depend on which studios commit their full catalogs and whether smaller, independent IP holders embrace the platform as an alternative to negotiating individually with each potential partner.
If Gao can get even two or three major players to treat AniBiz as their exclusive licensing portal, he wins. If studios hedge and maintain direct relationships alongside whatever listings they post on his site, he's just another marketplace competing for attention in a crowded space. For now, though, Kun Gao has announced himself back into the conversation—and in an industry where distribution is destiny, that's already more than most challengers can claim.
