Jonathan Gay (born 1967) is an American computer programmer and software entrepreneur based in Northern California. Gay co-founded FutureWave Software in 1993. For a decade, he was the main programmer and visionary of Flash, an animation editor for web pages. He founded Software as Art, which was later renamed Greenbox, which made energy management solutions for the home.

While in high school, Gay won a science fair award for programming on an Apple II computer and came to the attention of Silicon Beach Software founder Charlie Jackson. Gay began programming for Silicon Beach in his senior year. His first published product, released in 1985, was Airborne!, a black-and-white game for the Macintosh computer. While in college, he collaborated with game designer Mark Pierce and programmed Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle. All three were award-winning programs that included digital sounds, an unusual innovation for that era.

After graduating from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, Gay worked full-time for Silicon Beach Software. During this time he added some significant features to Superpaint 2, including Bézier curves, and began work on IntelliDraw, which was published by Aldus Corporation after the acquisition of Silicon Beach Software in 1990.

In 1993, Gay and Jackson founded FutureWave Software with the intention of creating graphics software for pen computing, in particular the Penpoint operating system that ran on the EO Personal Communicator.

Gay and programmer Robert Tatsumi finished the company's first product in 1994, SmartSketch, a vector-drawing program for the PenPoint operating system. Shortly thereafter, PenPoint was discontinued, ending that market for SmartSketch. SmartSketch was ported to the Windows and Macintosh operating systems, but with the advent in 1995 of the World Wide Web, Gay saw an opportunity to create an editor that could produce animations for web pages. The core technology of SmartSketch was repurposed to create a new product, FutureSplash Animator, adding support for timeline animation and a Netscape browser plug-in for playing back content.

FutureSplash Animator was released in May, 1996.

When MSN and Disney decided to use FutureSplash Animator for their websites, Macromedia made an offer to buy FutureWave Software and the acquisition was completed in December, 1996. FutureSplash Animator was renamed Flash 1.0.

The acquisition of FutureWave by Macromedia was unusual in that Macromedia's flagship product, Macromedia Director, overlapped with FutureSplash's functionality in many ways. Both were essentially animation/multimedia solutions consisting of an authoring tool and a browser plug-in runtime. As a Web technology, Flash had the advantage of a smaller runtime (on the order of 100 kilobytes, whereas Director's Shockwave runtime weighed over a megabyte), as well as a learning curve that was significantly less steep owing to the lower complexity of the product. Director was weighed down by six releases of accumulated legacy, and in particular because its original target was the CD-ROM market, not the Web.