Susumu Fujita, the CyberAgent founder whose hobbies became the business

Susumu Fujita

Photo: 映画世界社Eiga Sekaisha Ltd. / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 16, 1973 Sabae
Occupation	Businessperson
Awards	Young Global Leader · Mahjong Saikyosen winner

On the last Saturday of October a horse carrying wine-coloured silks embroidered with a shrimp will walk onto the dirt at Keeneland as the defending champion of the Breeders’ Cup Classic. His owner, Susumu Fujita, spent most of his adult life building CyberAgent, the Tokyo internet group behind the streaming service ABEMA and the game studio Cygames. He no longer runs it day to day. Few people outside Japan knew his name while he was its president; far more learned it when Forever Young beat America’s best older horses on an American track.

That reversal is the clearest way into Fujita. The founder who sold online advertising to Japanese companies has turned almost every private obsession he carried out of university into a business line, a broadcast or a piece of company marketing. Mahjong became a professional league streamed on his own platform. Football became a club he owns and chairs. Racing became a champion who now also exists as a character in a game made by his company’s own studio. Whether that is strategy or indulgence is a question his shareholders have asked for years, and the answer has kept moving.

He was born on 16 May 1973 in Sabae, in Fukui Prefecture, and lived there until he finished high school. His father was a salaryman at the textiles and cosmetics group Kanebo, and Fujita has said that becoming that kind of employee was what he most wanted to avoid. A teenage plan to make it in music ended in his final year of school, when he decided he lacked the talent. At Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, where he studied business administration, he was so absorbed by mahjong that he repeated a year, training under Shoichi Sakurai’s Jankikai school and seriously considering turning professional.

He took a job instead, joining the staffing company Intelligence in 1997, and left within a year. CyberAgent was founded in March 1998 to sell internet advertising. Two years later the company listed on the Mothers market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and Fujita, then 26, became the youngest person to have taken a company public there. He wrote about those years in a confessional memoir published in 2005, Shibuya de Hataraku Shachō no Kokuhaku (Confessions of a President Working in Shibuya).

Advertising paid the bills; games turned out to be the engine. CyberAgent established Cygames in 2011, and a decade later the studio released Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which reimagines real Japanese thoroughbreds as anime girls who train and race. By the fiscal year to September 2025, games earned about ¥60 billion in operating profit. In 2015 Fujita set up AbemaTV with the broadcaster TV Asahi, whose executive Hiroshi Hayakawa he had befriended over drinks, and the free streaming service launched the following year.

ABEMA is also where the case against Fujita is strongest. For roughly a decade it lost money, he refused to put a date on when that would stop, and profits from games and advertising covered the gap. Only in that same fiscal year did CyberAgent’s media and IP division post an operating profit, of about ¥7.3 billion. “We poured big losses into it since launch,” Fujita said when the result came in, and in the same breath the company guided to lower group profit for the following year. Not every bet survived long enough to be vindicated. A women’s magazine he launched in 2013 with the producer Yasushi Akimoto and the publisher Toru Kenjo lost ¥342 million and was sold two years later. His first venture into football, as vice-president of the company running Tokyo Verdy from 2006, ended with a withdrawal after two seasons of poor results. The boss and the fan also blur on screen. Fujita once played, as organiser and only amateur, in a year-long professional mahjong league broadcast on AbemaTV, finishing second, and admitted that some viewers concluded their president did no work at all.

Football gave him a second chance. In October 2018 CyberAgent bought 80 percent of Zelvia, the company behind FC Machida Zelvia, for around ¥1.1 billion, and in December 2022 Fujita became its president and chief executive. The club hired Go Kuroda, a coach who had spent decades building a high school team, and Machida won the second division in 2023 before finishing third in its first season in J1. Success brought hostility. In October 2024 the club filed criminal complaints over social media posts attacking its players and manager, with its lawyer saying new defamatory comments sometimes topped a thousand a day; Fujita compared it to bullying. A year later Machida beat Vissel Kobe 3-1 to win the Emperor’s Cup, its first major title, and in April 2026 the club reached the final of the AFC Champions League Elite, losing to Al-Ahli in extra time.

Mahjong runs underneath all of it. Fujita won the Mahjong Saikyosen title in 2014, and in July 2018 he became the founding chairman of the M.League, the professional league whose matches stream on ABEMA. He still chairs it.

Racing came last and has travelled furthest. The Japan Racing Association licensed him as an owner in July 2021, after he paid ¥470.1 million for a Deep Impact colt in May and bought 18 horses for ¥2.367 billion at that summer’s Select Sale, saying he wanted to give something back to racing after Umamusume: Pretty Derby. Forever Young, trained by Yoshito Yahagi, won the Saudi Cup in February 2025 and in November became the first Japanese-bred, Japanese-trained winner of the Breeders’ Cup Classic, holding off Sierra Leone by half a length at Del Mar. In February 2026 he won the Saudi Cup again, and the same month Cygames announced him as a character in the game. Fujita said that seeing one of his horses become an Umamusume had been a goal from the day he started as an owner. In September the horse won the Jockey Club Gold Cup at the rebuilt Belmont Park.

CyberAgent’s handover was flagged early: in 2023 Fujita said he would choose an internal successor and become chairman, and on 12 December 2025 Takahiro Yamauchi, who joined as a graduate in 2006 and founded the subsidiary CyberZ, became president. Fujita remains representative chairman and the largest shareholder, and the plan gives Yamauchi until 2027 to present his own long-term vision and until 2029 to carry most of the president’s duties. Fujita is still president of AbemaTV and of Zelvia. He married the actress Megumi Okina in 2004, divorced in 2005 and remarried in 2009.

The next date is the Breeders’ Cup Classic at Keeneland on 31 October, where Forever Young starts as the horse to beat. After that, the harder test is quieter: whether CyberAgent under Yamauchi keeps paying for the passions its founder turned into businesses.

Tags: business, ceos, business leaders, Umamusume: Pretty Derby, Breeders' Cup, Susumu Fujita

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