Christina Qi spent a decade making money for billionaires, building Domeyard LP—a high-frequency trading hedge fund that traded up to $7.1 billion a day. Then, she shut the whole thing down to start Databento, a market data infrastructure company.
Databento’s pitch is almost comically unsexy compared to her last venture: sell financial data feeds to the same banks and hedge funds she’d left. The startup just raised a $97 million Series B led by NEA, Fortune learned exclusively, with participation from DRW Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Tribe Capital. The round drew over $300 million in demand, the company said. And Qi is running it all from a farm in Utah.
With only 24 employees, Databento is already profitable—a combination so unusual that, by Qi’s own admission, her investors keep telling her to just spend more money.
“We haven’t really touched much of that $97 million,” she told Fortune. “Our investors are telling us, spend, spend money, and we’re trying. We’re buying servers, buying stuff like crazy, and yet we’re still profitable every month.”
The raise brings Databento’s total disclosed funding to around $127 million. No valuation has been made public, but the capital is already earmarked: the company plans to expand from its current servers housed directly inside stock exchanges to more than 20 data centers worldwide, and has secured an additional 100-plus petabytes of storage—more than doubling its previous footprint.
