The LSE Directory / Data providers
Databento is a market data provider that delivers normalised real-time and historical data through a single self-service API, capturing feeds directly from servers colocated at exchange data centres rather than buying them through redistributors. Coverage spans US equities (all 15 primary exchanges plus roughly 30 alternative trading systems), futures and options on venues including CME, CBOT, NYMEX, COMEX, ICE, CFE, Eurex and EEX, and OPRA options data, across more than 200 trading venues in total. Data is offered in multiple schemas from full order book (MBO/L3) down to OHLCV bars, plus raw packet captures (PCAPs) with nanosecond, PTP-synchronised timestamps, and up to 15 years of historical depth across a claimed 650,000-plus symbols. Its principal differentiator is the pricing and delivery model: customers are billed per byte of uncompressed data actually delivered, or can subscribe on tiered monthly plans, rather than committing to the large fixed licenses and lengthy procurement cycles typical of incumbent data vendors. A self-service portal lets a user add a dataset to a cart and pay only for what is consumed, with batch historical downloads charged once and re-downloadable for 30 days. This targets a broader customer base than the traditional buy-side accounts of legacy vendors: proprietary trading firms and quant hedge funds sit alongside pre-product startups and, per third-party reporting, artificial intelligence labs building on market data, all onboarding without a sales cycle. Databento was founded in 2019 by Christina Qi, who previously built and ran Domeyard LP, a high-frequency trading firm that traded up to 7.1 billion dollars a day, together with co-founder Luca Lin, formerly head of trading and quantitative research at Domeyard. The company raised a Series A of over 27 million dollars in November 2021, and in July 2026 closed a 97 million dollar Series B led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from DRW Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Tribe Capital, taking total disclosed funding to 127 million dollars; the round drew more than 300 million dollars in investor demand. At the time of that round Databento reported profitability with 24 employees, enterprise customer retention above 97 percent, and revenue growth of 6.65 times year over year. The Series B is being used to expand from its current colocated-server footprint to more than 20 data centres worldwide and to add over 100 petabytes of storage capacity, more than doubling its prior footprint, alongside plans to broaden coverage into new asset classes and geographies. Fortune reported in its coverage of the raise that roughly 90 percent of Databento's revenue now comes from large financial institutions and AI labs, naming Nvidia and OpenAI among its paying customers, and framed the company as a lower-cost, self-service challenger to incumbents such as Bloomberg terminals and LSEG's Refinitiv.
