Databento has successfully closed a Series B funding round, raising $97 million. This capital is designated for expanding the company's market data infrastructure platform. The round was oversubscribed by $300 million and led by the investment firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA).
Institutional Interest and Partners
In addition to existing and strategic investors such as DRW Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Tribe Capital, there was significant institutional interest in Databento. The company provides access to historical and current market data through a unified API.
Overcoming Financial Data Barriers
The traditional process of obtaining financial data often involves lengthy months of legal approvals, technical integration, and high initial costs. Databento solves this problem by offering a developer-friendly solution based on a pay-as-you-go model.
Christina Qi, one of the founders and CEO, started Databento to eliminate these costs. Prior to this, Qi worked at the hedge fund Domeyard LP, which processed billions of dollars daily. Her experience in quantitative trading shaped the platform's architecture, allowing users to receive institutional-grade data within minutes on demand. This usage-based model removes significant capital constraints that typically hinder small firms and independent researchers.
Expanding Presence and Integrating Crypto Assets
The new capital will be directed towards globally scaling the company's data infrastructure. Databento places its hardware servers in major global exchanges for direct collection of raw data. Following this round, the company plans to increase its presence to over 20 data centers worldwide and add 100 petabytes of disk space.
A significant part of this growth is related to digital assets. Databento currently provides data on cryptocurrency futures from CME and CFE. The platform also offers packet capture level data for crypto derivatives. With the Series B funds, Databento is integrating spot, futures, and options data from Binance, thereby unifying traditional finance and the decentralized crypto ecosystem within a single API.
Financial Performance and Development
Despite the saturation of the venture capital market, Databento demonstrates a high level of demand. The fintech startup is profitable with a staff of only 24 employees and has recently significantly increased its number of active API users. The company's annual revenue has grown 6.65 times, and the corporate client retention rate since launch stands at 97%. As a result of this investment, NEA partners Rick Yang and Danielle Lay will join Databento's board of directors.
The company serves over 3,000 firms globally, supporting complex trading desks with volumes measured in trillions of dollars. Databento also transforms automated workflow construction methods by collaborating with open-source tools like NautilusTrader. This allows quantitative researchers to build hybrid systems to monitor both traditional and crypto markets. The platform is developer-centric and owns the entire data stack from end to end without sacrificing speed. Trading desks no longer need to maintain extensive internal data pipelines for testing and deploying complex algorithms.
