Databento has raised $97M in Series B funding to build what it calls the market data platform for modern finance. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with DRW, Redpoint Ventures, and Tribe Capital joining. The company announced the raise on Thursday.
Demand ran well past the target. The round was oversubscribed, drawing more than $300M in interest, according to the company. That total takes Databento’s disclosed funding to roughly $127M three years after launch.
From hedge fund to data plumbing
Chief executive Christina Qi came to the problem the hard way. She co-founded Domeyard, a high-frequency trading fund that at its peak traded billions of dollars a day, Fortune reported. What slowed the fund down, she found, was rarely the strategy. It was the market data itself, and the operational mess of using it in production.
Databento was built to fix that. Its pitch is to shorten the path from idea to production, letting engineers pull clean price data through an API rather than wrangle raw exchange feeds. The company writes its own feed handlers for more than 70 exchanges and now serves over 3,000 firms.
Aiming at the terminal
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The target is a market long dominated by legacy providers. Bloomberg’s terminal, the industry standard, costs roughly $20,000 to $27,000 per seat each year. Global spending on market data topped $50bn in 2025, by Databento’s count.
Qi is betting the habits are about to change. “Programmatic access to market data is becoming the industry default,” she wrote. She expects that within three years, more finance professionals will know how to use a Databento API than a traditional terminal.
The customer list already spans hedge funds, proprietary trading shops, broker-dealers, and fintech companies. It also reaches into AI, with frontier labs among the buyers of its data. Nvidia is both a customer and a technology partner.
The numbers behind the raise
Databento reached the raise from a position of strength, which is rare for a startup at this stage. It says revenue grew 6.65 times year over year, while enterprise retention held at 97 per cent since inception. It also turned profitable ahead of schedule, without touching its previous round.
It did so with a small team. Fewer than 30 engineers run a bare-metal footprint serving more than 20 petabytes of raw data. That efficiency is the story Databento wants investors and customers to notice.
Where the money goes
The plan is to expand across new asset classes and regions. Databento has begun building coverage in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, and expects to grow to over 20 data centres worldwide within six months. To support that, it has secured more than 100 petabytes of usable storage, more than doubling its footprint.
As part of the round, NEA’s Rick Yang joins the board, with colleague Danielle Lay as an observer. Backers also include Alumni Ventures, Cross Creek, Motley Fool Ventures, and Operator Collective, among others.
Why it matters
Market data is quiet infrastructure, but it underpins almost every trade. A well-funded challenger built by traders, aimed squarely at the terminal, is a test of whether that plumbing is finally ready to change hands. For now, Databento is still the underdog. The habits it is betting against have held for decades.
