Databento, the market data platform for modern finance, announced a $97 million Series B financing led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from strategic and existing investors, including DRW Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Tribe Capital, among others. The round was significantly oversubscribed, drawing over $300 million in total demand.
“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,” said Christina Qi, co-founder and CEO of Databento. “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.”
Three years after launch, Databento has emerged as one of the fastest-growing companies in fintech. It is now the market data provider of choice for some of the world’s most demanding financial firms, whose daily trading activity is measured in the trillions of dollars. The company’s trajectory has accelerated rapidly: it reached profitability with just 24 employees, more than doubled its active API users in recent months, and grew revenue 6.65x year over year while maintaining over 97% enterprise logo retention since inception.
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NEA quickly identified Databento as a generational opportunity and moved decisively in the round. The firm’s partners, Rick Yang and Danielle Lay, will join Databento’s board, with Yang as a director and Lay as a board observer.
“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,” said Rick Yang, Partner and Head of Technology at NEA. “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.”
DRW Venture Capital’s investment is shaped by the operational demands of its parent firm, one of the most active proprietary trading firms across global markets.
“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,” said Kim Trautmann, Partner and Head of DRW VC. “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.”
The new capital will be used to broaden Databento’s coverage across asset classes and geographies while continuing to scale the infrastructure that sets it apart. The company colocates its servers at exchanges to capture data directly from the source and is set to expand to over 20 data centers worldwide following this round. It has also secured an additional 100+ petabytes of storage capacity, more than doubling its previous footprint.
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