Zurich-based ETF data specialist ETFBOOK has raised $13 million in a round led by Expedition Growth Capital, with existing investor BlackFin Capital Partners following on, to take its exchange-traded fund (ETF) data platform from Europe into the US and Asia-Pacific. The raise is more than three times the size of the €4 million Series A that BlackFin led in February 2025. It also lands 19 months after that round promised a US market entry “later this year”, which tells you how hard the American leg of the ETF data business is to crack.
The numbers explain why investors are paying up anyway. According to Startupticker’s report on the 2025 round, ETFBOOK then served more than 35 institutional clients. The September 16, 2026 announcement puts its EMEA base above 70 enterprise clients, with recurring revenue growing more than 100% a year over the last few years. The client count has roughly doubled while the company was still, by its own account, a European business.
What the $13m buys
ETFBOOK, the trading name of SquaredData AG, pulls fragmented ETF data into one normalised dataset. It sells access through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), a web analytics platform and a service called Workforce, which, Tech.eu reports, lets clients merge ETFBOOK’s verified data with their own or third-party sources. Its buyers include ETF issuers, fund administrators, market makers, authorised participants, asset and wealth managers, and hedge funds.
The company says the money will fund a US legal entity, a New York office and a local team, a Hong Kong team and more hiring at its technology hub in Cracow, Poland. Steve Twomey, a Boston-based Partner at Expedition Growth Capital, joins the board to steer the US push, according to FinTech Global. ETFBOOK is also building an AI conversational layer on top of its products.
The coverage gap is the real product roadmap
FinTech Global reports that ETFBOOK currently covers more than 11,000 ETFs across Europe and the US. ETFGI counted 17,654 ETFs with 34,072 listings from 1,025 providers on 85 exchanges at the end of July. That leaves roughly 6,600 funds, or about 38% of the global universe, outside ETFBOOK’s current footprint. Those funds trade outside the two regions it covers today, which is where this round is aimed. The listings figure matters too: almost two listings per fund is exactly the kind of cross-exchange duplication that data vendors get paid to reconcile.
Even the headline market size shows the problem. ETFBOOK puts global ETF assets at $25 trillion, heading towards $35 trillion by 2030. ETFGI’s figure for the end of July was $23.11 trillion. A near-$2 trillion gap between two specialists’ estimates, whatever the scope differences behind it, is a fair advert for the “single source of truth” ETFBOOK is selling.
New launches keep the pressure on. ETFBOOK counts more than 1,320 new funds so far in 2026, including over 970 in the US and over 350 in Europe, or about seven every trading day. ETFGI’s European report logged 379 launches from 79 providers by the end of July, alongside 27 closures. Each closure is also a reference-data change that someone has to process.
Incumbents are not standing still
ETFBOOK will be moving onto ground already held by much bigger vendors. Morningstar closed its acquisition of the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) in February, and its shareholder letter said Vanguard products linked to more than $3 trillion in investor assets would take the Morningstar brand. Among specialists, ULTUMUS has already plugged its ETF composition data into FlexTrade’s FlexOMS for sell-side creation and redemption workflows. None of the incumbents has publicly commented on the round.
“Global capital has been moving out of mutual funds and into ETFs for years, and there is no turning back. What never kept up is the data and analytics underneath this growth, globally and for AI-native applications,” said Pawel Janus, Co-Founder and CEO at ETFBOOK. Bartlomiej Igla, the company’s co-founder and CTO, told FinTech Global that its architecture “frees us from linear headcount growth”. Romain Grimal, Investment Director at BlackFin Capital Partners, said in the same announcement that the fintech-specialist investor is “doubling down on ETFBOOK”.
Why it matters beyond ETF desks
Portfolio composition files for actively managed and tokenised wrappers are getting more complex. Recent examples include T. Rowe Price’s active crypto ETF and Hong Kong’s first tokenised covered-call ETF. As they do, the data layer becomes operational plumbing rather than a research add-on. That same concentration dynamic has already shown up in ETF custody.
The next test is execution in New York. ETFBOOK’s first US attempt did not arrive on the 2025 timetable, and in the world’s largest ETF market it will be pitching against vendors that already sit inside issuer and market-maker workflows. Its best opening is the long tail of the 970-plus US launches this year. New issuers are the buyers least locked into legacy contracts, so the client count in its next funding update will show whether the Europe model travels.
Rick Steves
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011. He holds a degree in Business Administration and has experience producing real-time news, from both buy-side and sell-side, as well as for retail traders, brokers and service providers. Steves' work has appeared in a variety of online publications including FX Street, NewsBTC, FinanceFeeds, and The Industry Spread. Rick has great interest in the dynamics of the trading industry. The never-ending clash between technology, economics, regulation, and more importantly, the people.
