# Databento Raises $97 Million to Rewire How Wall Street Buys Market Data

By Ray Termsheet · 2026-07-09 · Deals & Funding · https://datacommenter.com/databento-raises-97-million-to-rewire-how-wall-street-buys-market-data/

*The Salt Lake City company’s oversubscribed Series B, led by NEA, is a bet that the market data industry works the way it does because incumbents want it to — and that a 24-person team that got profitable early can change that. Behind it is a founder whose first company survived an FBI interrogation, a police raid, and the death of its own business model.*

On Thursday, Databento announced a [$97 million Series B led by New Enterprise Associates](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/databento-raises-97-million-series-b-led-by-nea-302821464.html), with participation from DRW Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Tribe Capital, among others. The round was significantly oversubscribed — the company says it drew [over $300 million in total demand](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/databento-raises-97-million-series-b-led-by-nea-302821464.html) — and brings Databento’s disclosed funding to [roughly $127 million three years after launch](https://thenextweb.com/news/databento-97m-series-b-nea-market-data-bloomberg). NEA’s Rick Yang joins the board as a director, with his colleague Danielle Lay as [an observer](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/databento-raises-97-million-series-b-led-by-nea-302821464.html).

The headline numbers are unusual for a Series B, and not because of their size. Databento says [revenue grew 6.65 times year over year, enterprise retention has held at 97% since inception](https://thenextweb.com/news/databento-97m-series-b-nea-market-data-bloomberg), and — most striking — the company [turned profitable ahead of schedule without spending through its previous round](https://thenextweb.com/news/databento-97m-series-b-nea-market-data-bloomberg). It did all of this with [24 employees](https://fortune.com/2026/07/09/christina-qi-left-a-hedge-fund-trading-7-billion-a-day-for-a-farm-in-utah-startup-raised-97-million-to-rival-bloomberg-lseg-databento/). Startups do not typically raise nine figures from a position where they don’t need the money; Databento’s pitch is that the capital is for acceleration, not survival. The round will fund expansion to [more than 20 data centers worldwide and an additional 100-plus petabytes of storage capacity — more than doubling its previous footprint](https://www.utahbusiness.com/entrepreneurship/2026/07/09/salt-lake-city-databento-97-million-series-b-led-nea-venture-capital/) — as the company broadens coverage across asset classes and geographies.

It is Databento’s second major raise in roughly two years: in October 2024 the company [closed $10 million in additional funding, bringing its total Series A to $30 million, after a year of 985% revenue growth](https://www.utahbusiness.com/entrepreneurship/2026/07/09/salt-lake-city-databento-97-million-series-b-led-nea-venture-capital/).

The problem Databento was built to solve
Market data is the quiet toll booth of modern finance. Every trading firm, quant fund, and fintech needs exchange data, and acquiring it has historically meant some combination of: negotiating opaque enterprise contracts, waiting months for connectivity, managing colocation and feed handlers in-house, or paying for a terminal whose cost runs to [roughly $25,000 per user per year in Bloomberg’s case](https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/07/fintech-openbb-aims-to-be-more-than-an-open-source-bloomberg-terminal/). The industry’s dominant suppliers — Bloomberg, LSEG, FactSet, S&P Global — sell access in bundles, on annual contracts, with pricing that often isn’t published anywhere.

Databento’s model is the opposite: usage-based, self-service, and [billed by Fortune as a rival to Bloomberg and LSEG](https://fortune.com/2026/07/09/christina-qi-left-a-hedge-fund-trading-7-billion-a-day-for-a-farm-in-utah-startup-raised-97-million-to-rival-bloomberg-lseg-databento/) — the [first data vendor offering easy-to-use, on-demand market data with transparent pricing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4nYGpGj0Vs), in its own framing. The company [colocates its servers at exchanges to capture data directly from the source](https://www.utahbusiness.com/entrepreneurship/2026/07/09/salt-lake-city-databento-97-million-series-b-led-nea-venture-capital/), normalizes it, and delivers it through APIs and client libraries designed so that a quant can go from signup to streaming live or historical tick data in minutes. It sits deliberately upstream of the terminal business — infrastructure rather than interface. Founder and CEO Christina Qi has fielded the Bloomberg question directly: a thousand startups have pitched “a cheaper Bloomberg” and died, she has said, positioning Databento instead as [“one step upstream” of the terminal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4nYGpGj0Vs) — the defensible position is the plumbing, one step before the screen.

The customer base suggests the wager is working. The company reports [over 24,000 customers and data from more than 60 venues worldwide](https://databento.com/blog/christina-qi-ubs-female-founder-award), spanning individual quants to what backers describe as trillion-dollar trading desks. The investor list doubles as a customer reference: DRW, whose venture arm participated in the round, is [one of the most active proprietary trading firms across global markets](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/databento-raises-97-million-series-b-led-by-nea-302821464.html). “We know how critical high-quality data and reliable tooling are in practice,” said Kim Trautmann, head of DRW VC, adding that Databento’s combination of infrastructure and developer tooling matters more [“as automated and agent-driven workflows take hold across trading and research”](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/databento-raises-97-million-series-b-led-by-nea-302821464.html) — a nod to the AI-agent demand wave that every data vendor is now positioning for.

The founder: from a dorm room to $7.1 billion a day
Databento’s origin runs through one of the more improbable founder stories in quantitative finance. Christina Qi came out of MIT without the job she wanted — she has said plainly that she [failed to get a return offer after a Wall Street internship](https://www.letsengage.com/talent/christina-qi) — and instead started trading from her dorm room with [about $1,000 in savings](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christinaqi_my-hedge-fund-domeyard-lp-traded-a-record-activity-6641838422619144192-y_j7). With co-founders [Jonathan Wang (MIT, electrical engineering) and Luca Lin (Harvard, physics and math)](https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2017/09/06/the-three-quants-in-their-20s-running-a-hedge-fund-making-1-billion-of-trades-daily/), she built Domeyard LP, a high-frequency trading hedge fund [named for MIT’s Great Dome and Harvard Yard](https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2017/09/06/the-three-quants-in-their-20s-running-a-hedge-fund-making-1-billion-of-trades-daily/).

Domeyard took [nearly three years to reach launch](https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2017/09/06/the-three-quants-in-their-20s-running-a-hedge-fund-making-1-billion-of-trades-daily/), building everything in-house: [servers colocated at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s data center, a few million lines of code, and infrastructure supporting several petabytes of data](https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2017/09/06/the-three-quants-in-their-20s-running-a-hedge-fund-making-1-billion-of-trades-daily/). At its peak the fund [traded up to $7.1 billion a day](https://impactpodcast.com/episode/2022/05/turning-failures-into-opportunities-with-christina-qi/) and attracted attention — and capital — from the likes of SoftBank, which [took a 15.92% secondary stake in the management company](https://www.hedgeweek.com/qa-with-domeyards-christina-qi/). [Forbes profiled the three founders in 2017](https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2017/09/06/the-three-quants-in-their-20s-running-a-hedge-fund-making-1-billion-of-trades-daily/). Qi, who [ran the business side including fundraising](https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2017/09/06/the-three-quants-in-their-20s-running-a-hedge-fund-making-1-billion-of-trades-daily/), became one of the industry’s most visible spokespeople in the post-*Flash Boys* era, [teaching Domeyard’s case study at Harvard Business School](https://www.letsengage.com/talent/christina-qi).

The visibility cut both ways, and the war stories are genuinely wild. Early on, [police raided the founders’ apartment on suspicion it housed a marijuana farm — the trading servers in the closet were drawing more power than the rest of the building combined — and Qi was served an eviction notice that night](https://traderlife.co.uk/interviews/trader-dozen/trader-dozen-christina-qi/).

The FBI episode, examined
A more serious chapter — and one worth stating precisely, because it is easy to garble — involves the FBI. During Domeyard’s run, the fund accepted money from an investor who, [in Qi’s telling, was clever enough to pass the fund’s due diligence process while concealing serious red flags](https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/christinia-qi-on-building-domeyard-the-fbi-ceos-and-her-new-book/). That investor [was later arrested and went to prison](https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/christinia-qi-on-building-domeyard-the-fbi-ceos-and-her-new-book/). The FBI showed up at Domeyard’s office — Qi has recounted [being escorted out mid-burrito and questioned in an interrogation room](https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/christinia-qi-on-building-domeyard-the-fbi-ceos-and-her-new-book/) — as agents unwound the investor’s affairs, which she says [“opened a can of worms.”](https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/christinia-qi-on-building-domeyard-the-fbi-ceos-and-her-new-book/)

To be clear about what the record shows: the fraud was the investor’s. There is no public record — in press coverage, court filings, or SEC and CFTC enforcement actions — of Qi or Domeyard being accused of fraud, charged, or sued over the episode. Qi herself has been the primary source for the story, telling it in interviews as a cautionary tale about counterparty diligence: [“Big lessons learned on my end of learning who we worked with and not just chasing money. I’m fortunate today that I’m not being sued by anybody and I’m not under investigation.”](https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/christinia-qi-on-building-domeyard-the-fbi-ceos-and-her-new-book/) Domeyard did weather [lawsuits, FBI interrogations, and regulatory exams](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christinaqi_my-hedge-fund-domeyard-lp-traded-a-record-activity-6641838422619144192-y_j7) over its decade — Qi has described these openly as the operating friction of a fund that grew up in public, including [multiple audits in a single year](https://www.hedgeweek.com/qa-with-domeyards-christina-qi/) — but its closure was voluntary. The firm’s own statement described [a “graceful wind-down” with capital returned to investors, driven by headwinds to its trading strategies, scalability, and the competitive landscape for talent](https://www.linkedin.com/company/domeyard). Qi has been blunter: the fund [was down about 12% in 2020, investors wanted to stay in, and the founders concluded the HFT business simply couldn’t scale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4nYGpGj0Vs).

If anything, the episode reads today as part of the Databento thesis. A decade of being burned — by data costs that [“plagued us for a while”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4nYGpGj0Vs), by [vendors’ legal letters and licensing restrictions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4nYGpGj0Vs), by the operational weight of building everything in-house — is the customer pain Databento was built to sell against. The new company took shape [around the COVID-era split, with some of the Domeyard team following Qi](https://www.interactivebrokers.com/campus/podcasts/cents-of-security/lessons-from-a-hedge-fund-founder/) to the new venture.

The unlikely geography of it
The [Fortune profile that accompanied the raise](https://fortune.com/2026/07/09/christina-qi-left-a-hedge-fund-trading-7-billion-a-day-for-a-farm-in-utah-startup-raised-97-million-to-rival-bloomberg-lseg-databento/) leaned on the personal contrast: Qi left behind a hedge fund trading $7 billion a day for a farm in Utah. Databento is [headquartered in Salt Lake City](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/databento-raises-97-million-series-b-led-by-nea-302821464.html) — an unglamorous address for a company whose servers live in the same exchange data centers as the giants’. Qi, who has spoken candidly about [impostor syndrome](https://www.linkedin.com/in/christina-qi-591161330) and wanting to [“live quietly, working with friends in Utah”](https://impactpodcast.com/episode/2022/05/turning-failures-into-opportunities-with-christina-qi/), has built the company with an unusual profile for financial infrastructure: two dozen employees, [every resume reviewed by hand despite thousands of applications a week, and a workforce in which women and minorities make up a significant share](https://databento.com/blog/christina-qi-ubs-female-founder-award). In December 2025 she was named [UBS’s Female Founder Award winner, chosen from 13 finalists for Databento’s financial performance and growth potential as much as her leadership](https://databento.com/blog/christina-qi-ubs-female-founder-award).

The competitive question is the same one Qi fields on every podcast: can anyone actually dent Bloomberg, LSEG, and the exchange-owned data oligopoly? Her own answer is characteristically unromantic — Bloomberg is [“so solidified in this industry”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4nYGpGj0Vs) that its chat network alone sustains it, and Databento doesn’t need it to implode. The company is not selling screens to portfolio managers; it is selling pipes to engineers, in a segment of the market data industry where the buying experience has barely changed in twenty years and where [the rise of automated and agent-driven workflows](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/databento-raises-97-million-series-b-led-by-nea-302821464.html) is minting new customers who have never sat through an enterprise sales cycle and don’t intend to start.

Three years in, profitable, with [97% enterprise retention](https://thenextweb.com/news/databento-97m-series-b-nea-market-data-bloomberg) and [$300 million of investor demand for a $97 million round](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/databento-raises-97-million-series-b-led-by-nea-302821464.html), Databento has at minimum proven that those customers exist. The Series B is a bet on how many more of them there are — and on a founder who has already built financial infrastructure the hard way once, and this time gets to sell it instead of running on top of it.

 

---

Cite this analysis: https://datacommenter.com/databento-raises-97-million-to-rewire-how-wall-street-buys-market-data/
Need the underlying datasets (alt data, market data, AI training data)? Source licensed vendors via Brickroad: https://brickroad.network
More machine-readable access: https://datacommenter.com/llms.txt