Databento secures $97 million to challenge Bloomberg's terminal.

      Databento has successfully secured $97 million in Series B funding to establish what it describes as the market data platform for contemporary finance. The funding round was spearheaded by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from DRW, Redpoint Ventures, and Tribe Capital. The company made the announcement on Thursday.

      Investor interest exceeded expectations, with the round being oversubscribed and attracting over $300 million, as stated by the company. This brings Databento’s total disclosed funding to approximately $127 million, three years post-launch.

      Transitioning from hedge fund to data infrastructure, Chief Executive Christina Qi encountered the issue firsthand. She co-founded Domeyard, a high-frequency trading fund that at its peak executed billions of dollars in trades daily, as reported by Fortune. She discovered that the fund's slowdowns were typically not due to strategy but rather the market data itself and the operational complexities of utilizing it in production.

      Databento was established to address this challenge. Its value proposition is to streamline the process from concept to deployment, enabling engineers to access clean price data via an API instead of managing raw exchange feeds. The firm develops its own feed handlers for over 70 exchanges and currently caters to more than 3,000 businesses.

      Targeting a market traditionally dominated by established providers, Bloomberg’s terminal—considered the industry benchmark—costs approximately $20,000 to $27,000 annually per seat. According to Databento, global spending on market data surpassed $50 billion in 2025.

      Qi believes that industry practices are poised for transformation. “Programmatic access to market data is becoming the industry default,” she stated. She anticipates that within three years, an increasing number of finance professionals will be proficient in using a Databento API over a conventional terminal.

      The customer base already includes hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, broker-dealers, and fintech companies, extending even to AI, with frontier labs among those purchasing its data. Nvidia is both a client and a technology ally.

      Regarding the funding details, Databento approached this raise from a robust position, which is unusual for a startup at this stage. The company reported a year-over-year revenue growth of 6.65 times, and an enterprise retention rate of 97% since its inception. It also achieved profitability ahead of schedule without utilizing its previous funding.

      All of this was accomplished with a compact team. Fewer than 30 engineers manage a bare-metal infrastructure that supports over 20 petabytes of raw data, highlighting the efficiency that Databento wishes for both investors and clients to recognize.

      The funds will be directed towards expanding into new asset classes and regions. Databento has commenced building its presence in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, with plans to grow to over 20 data centers globally within six months. To facilitate this, it has secured more than 100 petabytes of usable storage, more than doubling its capacity.

      As part of this funding round, NEA’s Rick Yang will join the board, accompanied by his colleague Danielle Lay as an observer. Other investors include Alumni Ventures, Cross Creek, Motley Fool Ventures, and Operator Collective, among others.

      This development is significant because market data, while often unnoticed, serves as the foundational element for nearly every trade. A well-capitalized challenger founded by traders and focused on dethroning the terminal serves as a test for whether this crucial infrastructure is finally ready for change. For now, Databento is still viewed as the underdog, challenging habits that have persisted for decades.