Databento (Salt Lake CIty, UT) has raised $100 million in Series C financing at a $1.1 billion valuation. The financial data platform is expanding its global infrastructure as demand grows among financial institutions and AI companies.
Utah-headquartered financial technology company reaches unicorn status as demand for institutional-grade market data expands into artificial intelligence.
November 12, 2026 — November 12, 2026
Salt Lake City-based Databento has raised $100 million in Series C financing at a $1.1 billion valuation, marking a significant milestone for the Utah financial technology company and adding another billion-dollar business to the state's growing technology ecosystem.
The financing, announced November 12, was led by Fifth Down Capital, a Boston-based investment firm and one of Databento's earliest investors. Fitch Ventures, the venture investment arm of Fitch Group, joined the round as a strategic investor. Existing investors participating in the financing included New Enterprise Associates (NEA) of Menlo Park, California; DRW Venture Capital of Chicago; Tribe Capital of the San Francisco Bay Area; Redpoint Ventures of San Francisco; Hedosophia of London; Trousdale Ventures of Los Angeles; Cross Creek of Salt Lake City; Operator Collective, a venture firm built around a network of enterprise technology executives; Alumni Ventures of Manchester, New Hampshire; and TGVP, the San Mateo-based U.S. corporate venture capital arm of Japan's TOPPAN.
The announcement comes just four months after Databento announced a $97 million Series B financing on July 9, 2026, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Since closing that round, the company reports that its revenue has more than doubled while remaining profitable. According to CEO and co-founder Christina Qi, Databento was not actively seeking additional capital, but investors wanted to increase their commitments as the company's performance strengthened, while customers were pressing for faster product development and infrastructure expansion. The Series C gives the company additional capital to accelerate plans already underway.
For Utah, the financing is notable not only for its size but also for the company's location and founder. Databento is headquartered in Salt Lake City, and its co-founder and CEO, Christina Qi, has personal roots in northern Utah. Qi grew up in Logan, where her parents were attending graduate school at Utah State, before pursuing an education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and building a career in quantitative finance.
Her path to founding Databento included operating a high-frequency trading fund, Domeyard, before turning her attention to a persistent problem in financial markets: the complexity and cost of accessing reliable market data.
Building infrastructure for modern financial markets
Founded in 2019, Databento provides real-time and historical financial market data through application programming interfaces (APIs). Its platform gives quantitative trading firms, asset managers, brokerages, commodities businesses, digital asset companies, and software developers access to detailed market information without having to build and maintain their own extensive data infrastructure.
The company's services cover equities, futures, options, and indices. Its data includes individual trade events, quotes, order-book information, and historical market activity. These datasets are important to firms developing trading strategies, conducting market research, testing algorithms, and operating automated trading systems.
Traditionally, accessing institutional-grade financial data has involved complex licensing arrangements, substantial infrastructure investments, and specialized engineering resources. Databento's approach is to simplify that process through a unified API and a more accessible, usage-based model for historical data.
The company says its platform combines direct market data feeds, specialized hardware, and infrastructure located near major financial exchange systems to deliver accurate, low-latency information. Its goal is to make sophisticated financial data accessible to a broader range of customers, from individual developers and startups to major financial institutions.
AI expands the opportunity
An increasingly important part of Databento's growth is its expanding role in artificial intelligence.
As AI systems move beyond generating text and analyzing static information toward performing more complex tasks, access to accurate, structured, real-time information becomes increasingly important. Financial markets are particularly demanding environments, where the timing and precision of data can materially affect the results of automated analysis and decision-making.
Databento reports that it has signed enterprise contracts with five of the six largest frontier AI laboratories, establishing a growing customer base beyond its traditional institutional finance market.
The company's market data can support AI systems involved in financial research, quantitative analysis, market monitoring, and agentic workflows. These applications require reliable information about market activity, including historical records and real-time updates.
The development represents an expansion of the company's original market. Rather than serving only the trading firms that traditionally purchased institutional market data, Databento is positioning its infrastructure as a resource for companies building AI-powered financial applications.
Scaling with a lean team
One of the more unusual aspects of Databento's growth is the size of its workforce relative to its valuation and infrastructure requirements.
The company reached its $1.1 billion valuation with just under 40 employees. Databento says it has also maintained profitability while more than doubling revenue since its Series B financing.
That level of operating efficiency is notable in an industry where traditional market data providers have often required substantially larger organizations to operate comparable infrastructure.
"Companies in our industry have traditionally needed hundreds of employees to reach this scale," the company said in its financing announcement, pointing to the physical servers, specialized hardware, and systems required to capture, process, and distribute financial data around the clock.
Databento is also expanding its physical infrastructure internationally. During the four months preceding its announcement, the company had nearly completed infrastructure buildouts at nine data centers serving major financial markets and exchanges.
Those locations include facilities associated with the Australian Securities Exchange, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, Japan Exchange Group, the London Stock Exchange, Nasdaq's Nordic operations, and several Equinix data centers.
The expansion is part of a broader effort to increase the company's global market coverage and support additional datasets and asset classes.
Investors see an opportunity in financial data infrastructure
Fifth Down Capital's decision to lead the Series C reflects its continued confidence in a company it backed before it generated revenue.
"Fifth Down first invested in Databento pre-revenue, as we recognized early on that the company had an opportunity to challenge the established model for delivering financial market data," said Andrew Spellman, founder and CEO of Fifth Down Capital.
"Our confidence has only grown as Databento's traction and execution have demonstrated it can serve demanding institutional customers, sustain rapid growth, and build a profitable business," Spellman said.
Fitch Ventures' participation brings a strategic dimension to the financing. As the investment arm of Fitch Group, a global financial information and credit ratings company, Fitch Ventures brings experience in financial data and institutional markets.
"Financial data is becoming increasingly API-driven and machine-consumed, creating an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how institutions and other market participants access it," said Gabby Munoz, Global Head of M&A and Venture Investments at Fitch Group.
Munoz said Databento has developed differentiated infrastructure and a self-service model that makes institutional-grade market data available on demand.
The new capital will support continued investment in Databento's market data infrastructure and expansion into additional asset classes.
For Utah's technology ecosystem, Databento's latest financing illustrates the potential for companies headquartered in the state to build globally relevant infrastructure businesses. The company's combination of financial technology, data engineering, and AI applications also places it at the intersection of several rapidly evolving markets.
With a $1.1 billion valuation, a growing international footprint, and enterprise relationships with leading AI companies, Databento is moving beyond its original mission of simplifying access to financial market data toward a much larger ambition: becoming a foundational data platform for modern finance.
To learn more about Databento, visit databento.com.