Databento

Databento is a market data infrastructure and API company, not an investment firm. It does not manage external capital, make investment decisions, or operate as a family office. The company is run by Co-founder and CEO Christina Qi, alongside an engineering-heavy leadership team with prior experience at trading firms including Two Sigma, Tower Research Capital, and Flow Traders.

Databento distributes tick-level historical and streaming real-time market data for equities, futures, and options from over 60 trading venues. Feeds include full order book depth, top-of-book quotes, and trades, normalized through a single API and available on a pay-as-you-go basis. The platform was designed to replace the multi-vendor, flat-fee licensing model that the founding team encountered while building trading systems at Domeyard and Two Sigma.

Databento charges based on actual data consumption — measured by volume of records retrieved — rather than per-venue, per-user subscription fees. The company offers $125 in free credits at sign-up and does not require annual commitments, which lowers the barrier for startups and academic researchers while giving large funds predictable, usage-aligned costs for production workloads.

The company states that researchers and engineers at the largest market makers and hedge funds, representing over $100 billion in aggregate AUM, use its APIs. Databento does not publish a named client list, but the team's prior institutional relationships at Two Sigma, Tower Research Capital, Belvedere Trading, and Rotella Capital Management ground its credibility in the quantitative trading community.

Databento is a venture-backed technology company, not an investment vehicle. It raised over $27 million in Series A funding by November 2021 from leading investors, whose identities have not been publicly named. The firm does not participate in co-investments, fund commitments, or direct deals in the capacity of a family office or asset manager.

No philanthropic foundation or charitable vehicle tied to Databento, its co-founders, or its investors has been publicly disclosed. The company's public activities are limited to its commercial data distribution business and a university partnership program.

The engineering group includes the former tech lead for high-frequency market data at Two Sigma and the principal architect of a 100G appliance at Corvil. By recruiting connectivity engineers from Flow Traders and storage engineers from Pandora and Mailchimp, Databento built a team capable of handling the latency and throughput demands of institutional trading desks — a profile that distinguishes the firm from purely cloud-native data startups without front-office trading experience.