Kun Gao's AniBiz Repeats a Broken Pattern

Kun Gao left Crunchyroll last year and has now launched AniBiz, a B2B platform designed to streamline how anime studios, distributors. Broadcasters connect across borders.

The pitch is familiar in tech. It promises to eliminate the middleman, create efficiency, and let the marketplace work. What looks like a smart play from the inside—a former CEO with two decades of relationships, launching into a fragmented industry desperate for better tools—is actually a replay of a pattern that has broken better-positioned people.

In 2016, Funimation attempted precisely this. The company held substantial licensing assets and executive talent drawn from years inside the industry. They launched a direct-to-studio acquisition model designed to undercut Netflix's power as a gatekeeper. The bet was that their insider knowledge of what studios wanted and what consumers needed could reshape who held leverage in anime distribution—but within four years, Netflix had simply outspent them.

The structural mistake is identical each time. Gao is building a platform layer. Assumes the problem is friction—that studios can't easily reach distributors, that pricing is inefficient, that better information flow will open the market. But anime licensing isn't a market with a liquidity problem. It's a network of long-term exclusive contracts that were signed five, ten, sometimes fifteen years ago—and a studio that licensed its catalog to Crunchyroll or Netflix in 2015 cannot license that same content to AniBiz in 2025, no matter how elegant the interface.

What Gao possessed at Crunchyroll was not portable knowledge. It was access.

What Gao possessed at Crunchyroll was not portable knowledge. It was access. The contracts are written, the relationships are settled. A new entrant with insider experience can see exactly why the old system is broken—thus becoming the person most likely to overestimate their ability to fix it from outside. The only variable that could change this outcome is capital. If Gao can acquire enough content directly, he becomes a distributor, not a platform—but that requires the kind of spending Sony could absorb. The kind of loss tolerance most founders cannot survive.