A FinTech that delivers market data to clients via API has raised a significant new funding round.
About Databento and Its Latest Funding:
This week, Databento announced that it raised $97 million in new funding. The Series B was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) while existing and strategic investors such as DRW Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Tribe Capital also participated. While the round ended up at $97 million, Databento says that there was more than $300 million in oversubscribed demand for the round. To date, the company has now raised $138.8 million, including a $10 million Series A segment in 2024 as well as a $24.3 million Series A in 2021.
With the new capital, Databento intends to broaden its coverage, including increasing the number of asset classes and geographies it supports. It also plans to scale its infrastructure and notes that it’s secured an additional 100 petabytes of storage capacity.
Databento is a platform that offers an easy way to get both real-time and historical market data. According to its site, clients can create their first application with as little as four lines of code. Pricing for its products starts at $199 per month.
As Databento notes, in the three years since its launch, the company has reached a number of key milestones. This includes reaching profitability while having just two dozen employees. The platform has also more than doubled its active API users “in recent months” while growing revenue 6.65x year-over-year.
What They’re Saying:
Explaining the difference that Databento offers, co-founder and CEO Christina Qi said in a statement, “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.” Qi added, “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.”
Meanwhile, NEA Partner and Head of Technology Rick Yang said of the firm’s investment, “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.”
My Thoughts:
In its press release, Databento describes itself as being “among the fastest-growing companies in FinTech history.” I don’t know that to be a fact, but it does seem plausible given some of the metrics that they shared. Plus, nearly reaching a “megaround” for a Series B is pretty impressive. So, expect to hear more from Databento going forward.
