Databento raises $100M Series C at $1.1 billion valuation

Today marks a major milestone for Databento: we've raised $100 million in Series C financing at a $1.1 billion valuation. One of our earliest investors, Fifth Down Capital, led the round, and we're pleased to welcome Fitch Ventures as a strategic investor.

Existing investors including NEA, DRW Venture Capital, Tribe Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Hedosophia, Trousdale Ventures, Cross Creek, Operator Collective, AVG, and TGVP also made follow-on investments.

Since closing our Series B earlier this year, our revenue has more than doubled. We weren't actively fundraising, but our performance had strengthened our investors' conviction, and many wanted to increase their commitments. With customers also asking us to expand faster, we saw an opportunity to accelerate plans already underway.

Databento's impact is expanding well beyond our roots in institutional finance.

We entered 2026 with a customer base that included some of the world's top quantitative trading firms, brokerages, asset managers, commodities firms, and digital asset companies.

Over the past year, we've quickly established ourselves as a leading market data provider for AI and agentic workflows. We've now signed enterprise contracts with five of the six largest frontier AI labs.

We're also incredibly proud to have reached this valuation with just under 40 employees.

It's becoming more common for small teams to build billion-dollar companies in the AI era, but market data is an infrastructure-intensive business. Companies in our industry have traditionally needed hundreds of employees to reach this scale. Behind every API request is a network of physical servers, specialized hardware, and systems that capture, process, and distribute enormous volumes of data around the clock.

We've managed to balance rapid growth, profitability, and operational efficiency in an industry where achieving even one of these can be challenging.

Most of our customers already see Databento as their go-to source for order book and tick-level data, as well as the gold standard for consistent timestamping across different market data formats.

We've earned a reputation for the precision and accuracy of our market data. Now we're pursuing an even more ambitious goal: building the largest commercially available historical market data archive in the world. We want to bring that same level of detail to a much broader range of markets.

And we're moving fast. In the last four months alone, we've nearly completed infrastructure buildouts at nine data centers, marking the first phase in our global expansion: ASX ALC, HKEX, JPX, Aruba IT3, Equinix LD4, Equinix NY3, Equinix ZH4, LSE, and Nasdaq Väsby.

What started as an idea to challenge the status quo in market data has grown into something much bigger than we imagined. We're grateful that so many people believe in our mission and want to see how far we can take it.