Databento: data, not fluff
Databento CEO Christina Qi argued that quant teams need higher‑quality granular market data—not more alt‑data noise—and emphasized longer‑horizon strategies using jobs and commodities as true research levers. The point is operational: clean, relevant timestamps beat flashy but noisy datasets for replicable alpha. (x.com)
Databento’s live API exposes nanosecond, PTP‑synchronized timestamps and returns up to four normalized timestamps per market event to align timing across venues. (databento.com) The company sells raw exchange PCAP captures with nanosecond resolution, lossless capture up to 100 Gbps, coverage of 30+ trading venues, and up to six years of historical PCAPs stored in a multi‑petabyte cloud archive. (prnewswire.com) Databento advertises 90th‑percentile feed latency of roughly 42 microseconds over cross‑connects and about 590 microseconds over the public internet, while offering tick‑by‑tick full order‑book depth for equities. (databento.com) On Oct. 30, 2024 Databento closed an additional $10 million, bringing its Series A to $30 million after reporting a 985% year‑over‑year revenue increase and onboarding over 7,000 customers in the prior year. (prnewswire.com) Databento has explicitly integrated commodities and futures into its roadmap and co‑presented a “From Data to Decisions” webinar with Sparta Commodities about API‑first products for traders and quant research. (spartacommodities.com) The platform unifies live and historical interfaces so teams can replay intraday history with the exact same API calls—an operational feature marketed to support reproducible backtests and research workflows. (databento.com) Databento’s hiring traction—reportedly receiving ~20,000 CVs for a handful of openings in early 2024—underscores strong demand from quants and engineers for access to its low‑latency, high‑fidelity data stack. (efinancialcareers.com 1) (efinancialcareers.com 2)
