Databento Raises $97 Million Series B With Nvidia and OpenAI as Clients

Databento has raised $97 million in Series B financing in July, bringing the market data startup's total disclosed funding to roughly $127 million. The round lands with serious proof of traction: the company counts Nvidia and OpenAI among its 70,000 customers and disclosed 8-figure annual recurring revenue earlier this year.

The founder behind the company is Christina Qi, who now serves as CEO of the Utah-based, 38-person, fully remote firm. Her path to the round was anything but linear. It ran through a hedge fund she launched at 21, built to a peak of $7 billion in daily trading volume, and then deliberately shut down.

Who is Christina Qi?

Qi started her career as an undergraduate at MIT, where she co-founded the hedge fund Domeyard — an achievement most finance veterans spend decades chasing. Domeyard ran for eight years. Then 2020 broke it.

"We had a really bad year in 2020; performance was down 12%, and so we told our investors that we were shutting down," Qi tells Entrepreneur in a new interview.

Qi announced the closure in a July 2023 LinkedIn post, writing that shutting down Domeyard "felt like losing a part of my identity."

"Domeyard will always be my first venture — letting go was one of the most difficult decisions we've ever made," she wrote.

She had told MIT Sloan in a 2020 interview that friends "inspired" her to step away after a "particularly rough year," urging her to pause and reassess her career. Databento came out of that reflection.

Qi's background makes the trajectory more striking. She grew up on food stamps and welfare in a low-income household in Utah before attending MIT. Her journey, she says, "does feel like the American dream to an extent."

"Was it harder? Maybe. Look, the starting line might have been a few steps back," Qi says. "It might have been a little bit more difficult as a result because of where I'm from."

She describes persistent bias in professional settings. People have mistaken her for a waitress eight or nine times in her career — including once, two weeks before the interview, at a cafeteria. At networking events, she says, "people sometimes ask if I can speak English." English is her native language, and when she tells people she is from Utah, they ask where she is "really from."

"I still managed to raise a lot of funding, hire a fantastic team and run a tech business selling to quants, who are mostly men in finance," Qi says. "I'm in a very male-dominated industry, and I've managed to still be fine."

What does Databento actually do?

Databento provides market data to researchers at hedge funds and AI labs. Qi frames the mission simply: the company wants to become "the single source of truth for financial information."

The customer base now spans 70,000 accounts, including two of the most-watched names in AI infrastructure and research — Nvidia and OpenAI.

On revenue, Qi is deliberately guarded. "We grew our revenue almost tenfold from a base well above single-digit millions," she says. "We have a lot of competitors in this industry, which is probably why we don't share exact figures."

Databento's head of quantitative analytics, Lou Lindley, disclosed earlier this year that the startup had hit 8-figure annual recurring revenue. Qi has not made the company's valuation public.

Despite a customer base concentrated in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Qi runs the company from her home state of Utah. Her office companions include 10 chickens, two turtles and a 15-year-old dog.

How does a founder survive failure?

Qi says the Asian American culture she grew up in treated admitting failure as something to avoid at all costs. MIT broke that habit early. As a freshman, she applied to her first internship and got rejected within 24 hours.

"I cried," Qi says. "I just remember that core memory."

She then applied to 100 internships. Rejection became routine. "You realize, Oh, rejection is just normal," Qi says. "The first time, it hurts the most."

Today she treats daily rejection from investors and customers as a job requirement. If she is not failing, she reasons, she is not doing enough.

"Part of your job description as a founder, as a CEO, is to put yourself out there, embarrass yourself on stage and get rejected," Qi says.

She also pushes back on the cutthroat founder archetype. Instead of stepping over competitors for funding and attention, Qi argues founders can succeed by supporting each other.

"You can succeed and raise each other up and support each other, even as competitors in this industry," she says. "That is absolutely possible. That's what I have done and strive to do with a lot of our competitors in this space, with other founders."

Beyond Databento, Qi was elected co-chair of the board of Invest in Girls — a nonprofit focused on financial literacy for high school girls — in 2019. She has also held board and committee roles with the MIT Sloan Boston Alumni Association and 100 Women in Finance.

With $127 million in disclosed funding, 70,000 customers and AI labs hungry for financial data, Databento enters its post-Series B phase as one of the few market data providers positioned directly at the intersection of Wall Street and the AI boom — and Qi, twice a founder, has already proven she can walk away from a losing bet and build a bigger one.