Earlier in the summer, we reported that GDH, the parent company of the Gonzo anime studio and GONZO Rosso Online game studio, had been given a one-year grace period in which to improve its finances, or it would be delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Well, it's improving its finances all right. And it's made an investment that built on an experiment it had also started earlier this year.

GDH has received an investment of about US $18 million (1.9 billion yen) as well as a takeover bid from Japanese investment firm Iwakaze Capital. Mark Schilling, over at VarietyAsiaOnline.com, writes that GDH had issued new shares earlier this week, and that was when Iwakaze bought 1.9 billion yen's worth, which gave it a majority stake in the financially troubled company. The investment firm plans to continue buying shares from now until October 10.

As a result of the takeover, the top three officers of GDH will be leaving the company: President Shinichiro Ishikawa, Executive VP and COO Yasushi Uchida, and CFO Fumiaki Goto. Iwakaze will install its own team effective October 1, 2008.

This wasn't the only GDH/Gonzo news this week, however. Back in March of this year, GDH had decided that rather then censure the Crunchyroll video-streaming site as other companies were doing, it would instead work in cooperation with it, allowing it to play certain anime programs free, with an additional better-quality download-to-own option. Shortly after that, GDH also began to make anime episodes available to Crunchyroll (along with other sites like BOST TV) mere hours after they had first aired in Japan.

Now GDH has revealed that it had actually done much more than that: it had, in fact, invested US $2 million (210 million yen) in Crunchyroll back in April. This gave it a stake in the website, along with Venrock Capital, who had first invested US $4 million not long before that.

With the news of the takeover by Iwakaze Capital, it will be interesting to see whether the new owners carry on with the Crunchyroll project (and other recent deals made by GDH, such as its partnership with E2Max creating a new gaming hub in Singapore), or whether they will want to take the company in an entirely new direction.