Databento raises $100 million Series C at $1.1 billion
Databento's Series C raised $100 million at a $1.1 billion valuation. Revenue has more than doubled since July, with 39 employees and Fitch Ventures in.
Having tracked how long a new direct feed sits in procurement before it reaches a strategy, the useful question on the Databento Series C is not a stacked growth multiple. On November 12, 2026, the company said the Databento Series C had raised $100 million at a $1.1 billion valuation, led by Fifth Down Capital, with Fitch Ventures as a new strategic investor. The July 9, 2026 release had already put year-over-year revenue growth at 6.65 times, and Databento now says revenue has more than doubled since that round closed. The windows overlap, and the company has not published one combined multiple.
The November 12 release, datelined Salt Lake City, says the business remained profitable and that Databento had 39 employees when the Series C closed. Fifth Down, which says it first invested pre-revenue, led. The company post lists follow-ons including New Enterprise Associates (NEA), DRW Venture Capital, Tribe Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Hedosophia. Co-founder and CEO Christina Qi said that, until now, reaching this milestone "required hundreds of employees given the sheer scale of physical infrastructure involved."
What the API actually sells
Databento is not a terminal, and its historical service and live feed share one Application Programming Interface (API) and the same schemas: market-by-order for the full book, market-by-price for depth, top of book, tick-by-tick trades, time aggregates, instrument definitions, and auction imbalances. The company says it is a licensed distributor for 60+ trading venues, with up to 16 years of history, captured at the colocation sites that house each venue's matching engine. Client libraries cover Python, Rust, and C++, alongside a raw binary feed.
The about page still pitches pay-as-you-go history, so a customer pays for the data it uses. The historical page puts the corpus at over 15 petabytes of compressed raw packet captures (PCAPs) and 4 petabytes of compressed normalized data. The November company description adds indices to the futures, options, and equities lineup named in July.
Four months after the Series B
On July 9, 2026, Databento announced a $97 million Series B led by NEA. It said the round drew over $300 million in demand, that profitability had been reached with 24 employees, and that enterprise logo retention was over 97% since inception. Rick Yang and Danielle Lay, both NEA partners, were to join the board, Yang as a director and Lay as an observer. Proceeds were aimed at wider coverage, exchange colocation, more than 20 data centers, and an additional 100-plus petabytes of storage capacity.
The November post says the firm nearly finished nine builds in the last four months: ASX ALC, HKEX, JPX, Aruba IT3, Equinix LD4, Equinix NY3, Equinix ZH4, LSE, and Nasdaq Väsby, which advances the July map. It does not show that the plan for more than 20 data centers is finished. July's extra 100-plus petabytes was capacity Databento said it had secured, not the 15 and 4 petabytes of compressed data the product page says it already holds.
What Fitch Ventures adds
Fitch Ventures is the new strategic name, absent from the investors named in July. The release treats the stake as a view from a financial-information business with credit ratings, financial data, and market insights. Gabby Munoz, global head of mergers and acquisitions and venture investments at Fitch Group, said financial data is "becoming increasingly API-driven and machine-consumed." Kim Trautmann, partner and head of DRW VC, said in July that the libraries "shorten the path from idea to production," and DRW's November role was a follow-on rather than a new customer statement.
The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) cash deal for Octus, at $3.535 billion, is the incumbent pattern: buy a data workflow outright. ETFBOOK's $13 million raise sits at the other end, reference files rather than full books. Tickblaze's entry into the FPFX Tech stack wires prop-firm execution technology and does not own the exchange capture. News results for this round on November 13, 2026 were Databento's announcement and secondary rewrites, not a statement from LSEG, Intercontinental Exchange, or Bloomberg, and on the fintech tape that silence holds until a feed contract or a price card moves.
The November release puts the capital into market-data infrastructure and more asset classes. The post says customers already use Databento for order-book and tick data, that management wants the largest commercially available historical archive, and that enterprise contracts are signed with five of the six largest frontier artificial intelligence labs, which are not named. Andrew Spellman, founder and chief executive of Fifth Down Capital, said a pre-revenue bet on a different delivery model had been reinforced by institutional traction and profitability. The next test is whether the missing sites on the July list of more than 20 data centers come up before any new asset class stalls.
Reporting by Rick Steves. Filed 13 November 2026, 07:09 GMT.
Senior Reporter, Regulation and Fintech
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.
