Databento announced a $97 million Series B on July 9. New Enterprise Associates led the round, with DRW Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Tribe Capital, and eight other funds participating. Demand ran past $300 million, according to the company. Databento took less than a third of it and, by the CEO's own account, has barely spent any.
The company sells market data: real-time and historical prices for futures, options, and equities, delivered through an API. Its announcement is datelined Salt Lake City, and its listed headquarters is 26 S. Rio Grande St. downtown.
The figures the company reported alongside the raise are the reason to pay attention. Profitability with 24 employees. Revenue growth of 6.65 times year over year. Enterprise customer retention above 97 percent since inception. These are Databento's own numbers, and no one outside the company has audited them. But Christina Qi, the co-founder and CEO, told Fortune that the company remains profitable every month, even while buying servers as fast as it can, and that her investors keep urging her to spend more. Its customers include hedge funds whose daily volume runs to the trillions, along with Nvidia and OpenAI.
Qi ran Domeyard before this, a high-frequency trading fund that at its peak traded more than $7 billion a day. Her family immigrated from China to Utah when she was three, first to Logan, where her parents were in graduate school. She studied at MIT, built her career in Boston, and now lives in her hometown south of Salt Lake City, on what Fortune describes as a farm. Her origin story for Databento involves the industry's largest data provider: 11 months and more than 100 emails to buy a sample, which arrived by mail on a thumb drive. Databento's product lets a customer buy a data feed online and pay for what they use. A Bloomberg Terminal costs roughly $20,000 to $27,000 per seat per year. The industry spent more than $50 billion on market data in 2025, by Databento's count.
The company owns its stack end-to-end. It places servers inside exchange data centers and writes its own feed handlers, distributing data from more than 60 trading venues rather than reselling another vendor's feed. The new capital extends that: coverage in Europe and Asia, more than 20 data centers within six months, and another 100 petabytes of storage. NEA's Rick Yang joins the board as a director, and his colleague Danielle Lay as an observer. Total disclosed funding now stands at roughly $127 million. The previous raise was a $10 million extension in October 2024, bringing the Series A to $30 million. After a year, the company said it included a 985 percent revenue growth and 7,000 new customers.
The usual fate of companies like this is acquisition. MayStreet was sold to LSEG in 2022. BML sold last year for around $250 million, about where Databento stands today. Qi told Fortune she has other plans. "We're going to bring this way past a billion," she said.
What the announcement does not say is how much of this company is actually here. The headquarters is on Rio Grande Street, and the CEO lives in the state, but the company's own contact page also lists an office in Boston, and the announcement does not disclose where the 24 employees sit. Utah's fintech industry counted 67 companies supporting roughly 7,800 direct jobs and more than $1 billion in annual wages in 2023, according to the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, with lending as the largest segment, accounting for about a third of those jobs. A company that sits underneath the markets themselves, profitably, would be something different for the state. Whether Databento becomes that here or remains a Salt Lake address with a distributed workforce is the question to put to the company as the money is spent.
