Databento, a market data platform for financial institutions, announced it has raised $97 million in Series B funding in a round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from DRW Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Tribe Capital, and other strategic and existing investors. The financing was significantly oversubscribed, attracting more than $300 million in investor demand.
Founded to simplify access to institutional-grade market data, Databento provides real-time and historical data for futures, options, and equities through a unified API. The company was created by professionals with backgrounds in quantitative trading and high-frequency market making, with the goal of replacing lengthy procurement and integration processes with on-demand access.
Since launching three years ago, Databento has experienced rapid growth. The company said it reached profitability with just 24 employees, more than doubled its active API user base in recent months, increased revenue by 6.65x year over year, and has maintained more than 97% enterprise customer retention since inception. Its platform is now used by a broad range of financial firms, from individual quantitative developers to major trading firms whose daily trading volumes total trillions of dollars.
As part of the investment, Rick Yang, Partner and Head of Technology at NEA, will join Databento’s board of directors, while Danielle Lay, also a partner at NEA, will serve as a board observer.
The company plans to use the new funding to expand its market data coverage across additional asset classes and geographic markets while continuing to scale its infrastructure. Databento said it will grow its exchange-colocated infrastructure to more than 20 data centers worldwide and has secured over 100 petabytes of additional storage capacity, more than doubling its previous footprint.
Databento owns and operates its market data technology stack end-to-end, allowing it to deliver low-latency data directly from exchanges while simplifying integration for developers and trading firms.
KEY QUOTES:
“Every firm in finance depends on market data, but accessing it has been one of the industry’s longest-running bottlenecks. For decades, it’s meant months of procurement and integration work just to get to the starting line. Databento was built by practitioners across quant trading and high-frequency market making to eliminate this overhead, making institutional-grade market data available on demand. Our growth has driven a shift in how teams expect to acquire and work with market data, and this round positions us to lead it globally.”
Christina Qi, co-founder and CEO of Databento
“It’s rare to encounter a company where the product, the traction, and the founding team all point in the same direction with this much clarity. Databento has built the modern foundation this industry has needed for a long time, and the fact that it’s earned trust everywhere from students running their first strategies to the world’s most sophisticated trading desks isn’t by design—it’s what best-in-class looks like in a category this fundamental. This is exactly the kind of company we back at NEA, and we’re thrilled to be along for the ride.”
Rick Yang, Partner and Head of Technology at NEA
“As a diversified trading firm, our experience with modern data workflows gives us a clear perspective on Databento’s value, as we know how critical high-quality data and reliable tooling are in practice. Databento pairs robust data infrastructure with developer-friendly libraries that shorten the path from idea to production. That combination is only becoming more important as automated and agent-driven workflows take hold across trading and research.”
Kim Trautmann, Partner and Head of DRW VC
