Databento, a Salt Lake City-based market data platform, announced Friday that it has raised $100 million in a Series C round at a $1.1 billion valuation — just four months after closing its Series B. The company says revenue has more than doubled since that earlier raise, and that it wasn't even actively looking for new investment when the deal came together.
According to Databento's own announcement, the new round was led by Fifth Down Capital, with Fitch Ventures joining as a strategic investor. The company said existing backers, including NEA, DRW Venture Capital, Tribe Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Hedosophia, also participated. Databento's CEO, Christina Qi, said the company wasn't actively fundraising but that strong performance had deepened investor confidence. “We weren't actively fundraising, but our performance had strengthened our investors' conviction, and many wanted to increase their commitments,” the company said in its blog post, adding that customers were also pushing for faster expansion.
Per the same account, Databento said it has nearly finished infrastructure buildouts at nine data centers in just the last four months. The company reports those buildouts mark the first phase of a broader push to capture data directly at exchange colocation sites, with locations reportedly including ASX ALC, HKEX, JPX, LSE and several Equinix sites, as detailed in the Dealroom report on the raise.
A Lean Team Behind a Billion-Dollar Price Tag
Databento says it reached its new $1.1 billion valuation with just under 40 employees, a detail the company highlighted as a point of pride in its funding announcement. The startup, which according to TheSaaSNews is based in Salt Lake City, offers real-time and historical data across equities, futures, options and indices through a single, unified API. Dealroom's reporting adds that Databento's client base spans quantitative trading firms, brokerages, asset managers and digital asset clients.
The company reports it has signed enterprise contracts with five of the six largest frontier AI labs — a company-reported figure tied directly to a demand trend observed beyond Databento's own numbers. Market-data buyers more broadly are facing growing pressure to make their products easier to discover, price, integrate and consume, according to A-Team Insight, which also notes that large AI labs have emerged as a newer category of data buyer alongside traditional financial institutions.
Big Ambitions for a Historical Data Archive
Databento says its longer-term goal is to build the world's largest commercially available historical market data archive, and to extend the same level of detail it currently offers into a broader range of asset classes. The company frames its recent infrastructure spending as laying groundwork for that expansion rather than a one-off push tied to the new funding.
Dealroom's report characterizes the Series C as ranking in the top 10% of U.S. fintech Series C rounds on record, and frames investor interest as a bet on an API-first challenger at a moment when trading firms and AI companies alike are seeking more programmatic access to detailed market data. Databento's previous funding round, a $97 million Series B, was reported by SiliconANGLE in July 2026, which noted the company drew roughly $300 million in investor demand at the time.
Notably, available evidence does not independently verify Databento's reported revenue growth, its frontier-AI-lab contract count, its employee total, or the pace of its data-center buildouts — all of these figures trace back to the company's own account of its progress. There is also no independent evidence establishing what effect, if any, Databento's growth has had on established market-data providers or on its broader market share.
