Salt Lake City market data platform Databento raised a $100 million Series C at a $1.1 billion valuation this week, in a round led by Fifth Down Capital, an early investor in the company. Databento and PR Newswire dated the announcement 12 November 2026. The company sells real-time and historical market data to quantitative trading firms, brokerages, asset managers, commodities firms and digital asset companies, and says the new capital will go toward market data infrastructure and expansion into additional asset classes.
Who put in the money
Fifth Down Capital led the Series C, having backed Databento early. The round also included a strategic investment from Fitch Ventures, which the company’s release describes as bringing the perspective of a financial information provider with expertise in credit ratings, financial data and market insights.
Existing backers followed on. Databento’s own blog lists NEA, DRW Venture Capital, Tribe Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Hedosophia, Trousdale Ventures, Cross Creek, Operator Collective, AVG and TGVP as participants. The PR Newswire release characterises the group as “nearly all of the company’s existing investors,” naming NEA, DRW Venture Capital, Tribe Capital and Hedosophia.
The raise follows a $97 million Series B the company announced on 9 July, four months earlier. Databento says it was not actively fundraising ahead of the Series C, and that its performance strengthened investor conviction while customers pushed it to expand faster. On traction, the company says revenue has more than doubled since the Series B while the business remained profitable, and that it had 39 employees when the round closed — the blog phrases the same figure as just under 40. Databento also says it holds enterprise contracts with five of the six leading frontier AI labs.
What Databento is building
Databento describes its product as a unified API delivering real-time and historical data across futures, options, equities and indices. The release says the company owns the entire stack from source to delivery, and claims it is the first platform of its kind to combine the performance and reliability demanded by leading trading firms with a simpler developer experience.
Infrastructure is where the money goes. The company says that in the last four months it has nearly completed buildouts at nine data centres — ASX ALC, HKEX, JPX, Aruba IT3, Equinix LD4, Equinix NY3, Equinix ZH4, LSE and Nasdaq Väsby — which it frames as the first phase of a global expansion. The release says the Series C will support continued investment in market data infrastructure and expansion into additional asset classes.
The company also says it has established itself as a market data provider for AI and agentic workflows, and that it has signed enterprise contracts with five of the six leading frontier AI labs. Separately, Databento says it is now pursuing the goal of building the largest commercially available historical market data archive — framed in its blog as an ambition it is working toward rather than a finished product.
What the raise means for vendors
A profitable company that reached a $1.1 billion valuation with 39 employees is a specific kind of buyer. The release notes that headcount is a fraction of that at traditional market data providers, so there is little staff sprawl to sell into, while the stated use of funds points budget toward market data infrastructure and additional asset classes. Vendors selling into FinTech startups at this stage are pitching a small, technical team.
The API-first delivery model also makes Databento a recognisable profile for anyone tracking SaaS startups carrying heavy fixed infrastructure costs. The company’s own framing is that behind every API request sits a network of physical servers, specialised hardware and systems capturing, processing and distributing data around the clock — and nine near-complete data centre buildouts suggest where near-term spend sits.
Databento is headquartered in Salt Lake City, one data point for anyone tracking United States startups outside the coastal hubs. For teams building pipeline against rounds like this one, Growth List tracks recently funded startups each week, including this week’s LangChain’s $300 million Series C and, among recent trading-adjacent financings, Kalshi’s $1 billion raise at a $40 billion valuation.
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Sources: Databento blog, 12 November 2026; Databento via PR Newswire; Databento blog, 9 July 2026. Featured image: Salt Lake City skyline, by Invictus323, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.