# Steamboat Ventures

> Steamboat Ventures is a VC fund in Glendale backing Software and Mobile. See 53 investments, check sizes, portfolio and contact details. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: VC Fund
- Location: Glendale, United States
- Total investments: 53
- Last investment: Apr 2016
- Lead investor: 30%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/steamboat-ventures
- Website: http://steamboatvc.com

Steamboat Ventures is a VC fund in Glendale focused on Software and Mobile. 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 helpyoung 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.

## Contacts

5 contacts available for Steamboat Ventures. Shizune tracks 4 team members at Steamboat Ventures. Sign up free to unlock them: https://app.shizune.co/sign-up/investor-profiles/find-team-emails/steamboat-ventures?utm_source=investor_profile

## Round sizes

| Stage | Round size |
| --- | --- |
| Series A | $1M–$88M |
| Series B | $4M–$35M |
| Series C | $5.5M–$28M |

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Software | 8 | 15% |
| Mobile | 5 | 9% |
| E-Commerce | 5 | 9% |
| Advertising | 5 | 9% |
| Enterprise Software | 5 | 9% |

59 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Series B | 17 | 32% |
| Series C | 10 | 19% |
| Series A | 9 | 17% |
| Series D | 6 | 11% |
| Funding Round | 3 | 6% |

### Country

| Country | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| United States | 21 | 40% |
| China | 5 | 9% |
| Switzerland | 1 | 2% |

## Team

| Name | Title | Investments | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| John Ball | Founder and Managing Director | 5 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/john-ball |
| Liping Fan | Administrative Partner & CFO | 11 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/liping-fan |
| Daisy Qiu | Finance Director | 0 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/daisy-qiu |
| Perry Chui | Partner | 4 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/perry-chui |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Mama+ | 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 |  |
| RazorGator | 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 | 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 Commerce | 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 |  |
| FunPlus | 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 | 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 | 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 |  |
| Anova Data (Formerly Zettics) | Zettics delivers a 360° understanding of data usage, enabling operators to extract greater value from their subscriber relationships and networks while allowing the operator to fully comply with subscriber privacy policies. Zettics enables operators to monetize data with third parties, understand trends in data usage, enrich their CRM systems,identify network abuse, analyze pricing plans, enhance advertising offers, reduce churn, forecast network usage growth, and more. Zettics products deliver over 60 use cases that provide a significant return on investment to operators. | $8.2M | Series D | Jul 24, 2013 |  |
| EdgeCast | EdgeCast is a content delivery network (CDN) that helps companies accelerate and deliver static and dynamic content to end users around the world. It has since evolved into a full-service web performance company, with the recent launch of front-end optimization, DNS, and eCommerce CDN products.Major customers include Yahoo!, Tumblr, Pinterest,Twitter, Wordpress, and Hulu. The company has about 6,000 customers (as of October 2013) and carries approximately 6% of the world’s Internet traffic. Deloitte recently ranked EdgeCast as the #1 fastest-growing Internet company in America, and the #1 fastest-growing Los Angeles company in their 2012 "Fast 500" list. | $54M | Series D | Jul 18, 2013 |  |
| Photobucket | 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. | $5.7M |  | May 14, 2013 |  |

10 of 53 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Hummer Winblad Venture Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/hummer-winblad-venture-partners) — VC Fund, 5 deals together
- [Voyager Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/voyager-capital) — VC Fund, 5 deals together
- [Benchmark](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/benchmark) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [Shelter Capital Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/shelter-capital-partners) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [StarVest Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/starvest-partners) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [AllegisCyber](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/allegis-capital) — VC Fund, 2 deals together

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## FAQ

### What does Steamboat Ventures invest in?

Steamboat Ventures invests primarily in Software, Mobile and E-Commerce startups, most often at Series B and Series C stage. Most of the 53 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### What is Steamboat Ventures's check size?

Steamboat Ventures typically joins rounds of $1M–$88M at Series A, $4M–$35M at Series B and $5.5M–$28M at Series C. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds Steamboat Ventures participates 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 Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.

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