Steamboat Ventures
VC Fund
Glendale, United States
Steamboat Ventures is a VC fund in Glendale focused on Software and E-Commerce. Steamboat Ventures was founded in 2000, and named after the famous Mickey Mouse cartoon Steamboat Willie. Theatrically released in New York in 1928, Steamboat Willie was the screen debut of Mickey Mouse. It was also the first animated cartoon to use synchronized sound -- a great innovation at the time. Our mission at Steamboat Ventures is to help young companies successfully face the challenges of becoming leaders in their markets. We invest in early through growth stage companies that are pursuing opportunities at the intersection of technology, media, and consumer sectors.
- Total investments:
- 56
- Last investment:
- Lead investor:
- 30%
- Fund size:
- $41M
- Last fund:
Last updated:
For AI agents: llms.txt
Industries Steamboat Ventures invests in
Stages Steamboat Ventures invests in
Countries Steamboat Ventures invests in
Round sizes
Contacts
| Name | Phone | Socials | |
|---|---|---|---|
Round size
- Series A
- $1M–$88M
- Series B
- $4M–$35M
- Series C
- $7.5M–$28M
Investment Focus
Industry
- Software 7 (13%)
- E-Commerce 7 (13%)
- Enterprise Software 6 (11%)
- Video 5 (9%)
- Mobile 5 (9%)
Stage
- Series B 17 (30%)
- Series C 15 (27%)
- Series A 9 (16%)
- Series D 6 (11%)
- Funding Round 3 (5%)
Country
- United States 23 (41%)
- China 6 (11%)
- Switzerland 1 (2%)
Team
| Name | Title | Investments | Links | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
John Ball
Founder and Managing Director
|
Founder and Managing Director | Total investments: 5 | Find email | |
Liping Fan
Administrative Partner & CFO
|
Administrative Partner & CFO | Total investments: 11 | Find email | |
Daisy Qiu
Finance Director
|
Finance Director | Total investments: 0 | Find email | |
Perry Chui
Partner
|
Partner | Total investments: 4 | Find email |
Investments
| Company | Description | Round | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wosai is a developer of mobile payment software. It also provides merchants with professional mobile payment collection, marketing management software, advertising, supply chain management, shared charging resources, merchant community, and other services. | Series C / Sep 26, 2017 | ||
| MAMA+ aims to help more mothers "become a better mother," for the benefit of family and society as a concept, is committed to "serve for mothers"; the same time, Internet technology and family relations research as a dual-driven, brought together many passionate technical talent. Researchers who can feel empathy with theirmothers are all motivated by their mothers' needs and insist on using their strength to make their feelings come true so as to realize more value for their mothers. | Series C / Apr 07, 2017 | ||
| MAMA+ aims to help more mothers "become a better mother," for the benefit of family and society as a concept, is committed to "serve for mothers"; the same time, Internet technology and family relations research as a dual-driven, brought together many passionate technical talent. Researchers who can feel empathy with theirmothers are all motivated by their mothers' needs and insist on using their strength to make their feelings come true so as to realize more value for their mothers. | Series B / Apr 11, 2016 | ||
| Joyus is a startup that's helping shoppers discover goods via short-form videos.Welcome to Joyus, a brand new online shopping experience to help you discover and buy the things you'll love.Our purpose at Joyus is to help delight and transform your shopping experience by harnessing the power of video. Each week our amazing curatorsshare their special apparel, beauty and lifestyle finds with you and then show you how to make them work for you. Each item is available for sale for a limited time through our exclusive video sales platform, making it easy for you to buy the things you love. You can also easily share these videos with your friends on Facebook and Twitter with just a simple click.Whether it's uncovering the latest trends, bringing our favorite brands with you, or solving a dilemma - all our video sales share one thing in common. We believe that sharing our authentic passion and finds with you is the key to creating a truly Joyus shopping experience online. | $24M / Series C / Jun 04, 2015 | ||
| RazorGator is the 3rd largest player in the online ticket reselling business behind eBay's StubHub and Ticketmaster's TicketsNow according to December 2007 comScore data. The service covers reselling of sports, theater, and concert tickets, as well as vacation packages for various sporting events. | Series D / Dec 31, 2014 | ||
| Photobucket is the world's leading dedicated photo and video sharing service. With over 100 million registered members, Photobucket users upload over four million images and videos per day from the Web, Smartphones, and connected digital cameras. Photobucket hosts, preserves and protects photos and videos while bringing members the very bestbrowsing, sharing and editing experiences. In addition to uploading and sharing with friends and family on the Photobucket site, users can also instantly share memories across all of the most popular social networks, instant messenger applications, through email, and from their mobile phones. In order to ensure a safe environment for members and partners, Photobucket actively moderates the content posted on the site. Photobucket, Corp. was previously Ontela, Inc. Ontela acquired Photobucket, Inc from Fox Interactive Media, adopted the Photobucket brand, and changed its name to Photobucket Corp. Photobucket, Corp.'s headquarters are in Denver, Colorado with a regional office in San Francisco, California. | $3.2M / Aug 14, 2014 | ||
| Kibo provides everything retailers need to run an omnichannel commerce business from in-store offerings like a point of sale, dynamic payment processing, and store optimization to online applications like web-based merchandising, website content management, and design to distributed order management for omnichannel fulfillment. Kibo will alsoprovide integrated search functions and back-end support for warehouse management, shipping, reporting, analytics, and customer loyalty program.The company also provides a complete omnichannel commerce platform delivered with the lowest total cost of ownership and the fastest time to market. By leveraging cloud technologies, individualized buying experiences, and true enterprise scale, Kibo enables to reach higher peaks of sales and consumer loyalty. | $4.7M / Series D / Apr 24, 2014 | ||
| Founded in 2010, FunPlus is a world class, independent game developer and publisher headquartered in Switzerland with operations in Spain, Sweden, Russia, United States, Japan and China. As an organization that fosters the best creative talent in the world, employing over 2,000, the company has developed and published mobile games that have rankedin the #1 spot in nearly 70 countries, which includes State of Survival, Kings of Avalon and Guns of Glory. FunPlus studios include KingsGroup, Puzala, Seven Games and Imagendary Studios. In 2016, the company sold its DianDian Interactive studio to Century Games.The FunPlus brand powers FunPlus Phoenix (FPX), one of the world’s most successful esports organizations. | $74M / Series B / Mar 18, 2014 | ||
| Vobile is the worldwide leader in video and audio content protection, measurement, and monetization services. Its patented core VDNA technologies enable fully automated identification, tracking, and management of any video and audio content with high accuracy and scalability. Vobile operates the VDNA Database (VDDB), which is the most comprehensivedatabase of authorized video fingerprints, metadata, and business rules from major movie studios, television networks, and record labels. Founded in 2005, the company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with additional offices in the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. | $11.3M / Series C / Dec 01, 2013 | ||
| Chukong Technologies is a mobile entertainment platform company that provides tools to enhance efficiency and lower costs for developers and mobile content creators across the world. Born from CocoaChina.com, the largest iOS developer community in China, Chukong is headquartered in Beijing, China, and also has operations in Tokyo, Seoul,Taipei, and Menlo Park, California. Chukong sponsors and maintains Cocos2d-x , the cross platform open source game engine that has been downloaded more than 1.1 million times across 150 countries. Seven of the 10 top grossing games in China were built on Cocos2d-x. To complement the game engine, Chukong has created the developer toolset CocoStudio, which makes it easy for teams to design, build and animate games.Chukong’s in-house development studio has built top-ranking games for players around the world. Previously operating under the name Punchbox, Chukong’s game development team, Coco, is behind top games such as the Fishing Joy franchise (one of the most popular and highest grossing mobile games in China). Pocket Climber, and Where’s My XiYangYang.To date, the company has released 8 games developed in-house since it was founded in 2008. Combined with its published titles, the company’s portfolio has more than 1 billion sessions per month, 63 million monthly active users, and 350 million activated downloads.Under their CocoaChina brand, Chukong Technologies partners with international developers who want to access the Chinese mobile gaming market. CocoaChina offers a full suite of services to help developers go East, from offering feedback on game design to maximize montetization and handling local app store distribution to combating fraud and piracy and assisting with translation and localization.Chukong has worked with more than 20 international studios to help bring their games to Chinese audiences, including mobile gaming giants like Nexon, GameLoft, Disney, Gumi, and Konami.In addition, Chukong is helping elite Chinese developers to explore opportunities overseas and has published top grossing and top downloaded games in Taiwan, Korea, United States and many other markets. | $50M / Series D / Oct 18, 2013 | ||
| See all 56 investments → | |||
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FAQ
What does Steamboat Ventures invest in?
Steamboat Ventures invests primarily in Software, E-Commerce and Enterprise Software startups, most often at Series B and Series C stage. Most of the 56 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.
What round sizes does Steamboat Ventures invest in?
Steamboat Ventures typically joins rounds of $1M–$88M at Series A, $4M–$35M at Series B and $7.5M–$28M at Series C. These are whole funding-round sizes, not Steamboat Ventures's own check, which is rarely disclosed: the 10th–90th percentile of the confirmed public funding rounds Steamboat Ventures took part in.
How do I contact Steamboat Ventures?
Public channels for Steamboat Ventures include LinkedIn and the website linked on this profile. For a verified work email and phone number, create a free Shizune account — contact data is searched across 20+ sources and validated before delivery, so your outreach lands in the right inbox.
Who are the partners at Steamboat Ventures?
The team at Steamboat Ventures includes John Ball (Founder and Managing Director), Liping Fan (Administrative Partner & CFO) and Daisy Qiu (Finance Director). The Team section lists each member with their title, investment count and links.
Is Shizune's investor data accurate?
Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Oct 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.
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