Market data platform startup Databento Inc. today revealed that it has raised $97 million in new funding to broaden its data coverage across asset classes and expand internationally.

Investor demand ran past $300 million, according to the company, more than three times what the round finally took.

Founded in 2019, the company sells real-time and historical data on futures, options and equities through one application programming interface. Rather than taking feeds from a redistributor, Databento captures data at the source. Databento puts its own servers inside exchange data centers and pulls the data at the source, a setup it now plans to run across more than 20 data centers. Storage is expanding as well, by more than 100 petabytes, which more than doubles what the company had.

Databento was started by Christina Qi, who previously ran high-frequency trading firm Domeyard LP. At its peak, Domeyard traded as much as $7.1 billion a day.

The company says it has seen strong growth. Revenue rose 6.65 times year-over-year and active API users more than doubled in recent months, both off undisclosed bases, according to the company. Enterprise customer retention has held above 97% since Databento began selling. The company reached profitability with 24 employees.

“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,” Chief Executive Qi said in the company’s announcement. “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.”

The market data business is dominated by incumbents including Bloomberg L.P. and London Stock Exchange Group plc, whose terminal and feed subscriptions are a fixed cost on most trading desks. Databento’s pitch is that firms should be able to buy what they need on demand, without a procurement cycle in front of it.

New Enterprise Associates Inc. led the round. Partners Rick Yang and Danielle Lay are joining the Databento board, Yang as a director and Lay as a board observer. Yang, who heads technology investing at the firm, said Databento has built a modern foundation the industry has needed for years, one trusted by students running their first strategies and by the most sophisticated trading desks alike.

DRW Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Tribe Capital also participated, alongside other existing backers. DRW VC invests on behalf of proprietary trading firm DRW Holdings LLC. DRW VC’s head, Kim Trautmann, said Databento’s developer libraries shorten the path from idea to production and that this counts for more as agent-driven workflows take hold across trading and research.

The new funding takes the total raised by Databento to $127 million.

Photo: Databento