Building the Infrastructure for AI-Native Hedge Funds: Our Thesis on Databento

We are extremely proud to have backed Christina Qi, Luca Lin, and the Databento team since 2024. Today, Databento announced its oversubscribed $97M Series B led by NEA.

The future of investing is becoming AI-native, but the market data infrastructure powering financial markets has not kept pace.

For decades, accessing institutional-grade market data has been slow, expensive, and overly complex. Legacy providers were built for a different era, one defined by long sales cycles, opaque pricing, fragmented licensing, and cumbersome integrations.

Modern financial teams need something different. Traders, quants, fintech builders, AI labs, and investment firms need clean, reliable, programmatic access to real-time and historical market data that can plug directly into research environments, models, and production systems.

Christina and Luca saw this gap early.

Christina brought a rare perspective to the problem, having founded an HFT-focused hedge fund early in her career that traded up to $7.1B per day. She understood firsthand how critical data quality, latency, reliability, and usability are for sophisticated market participants.

Databento is building the modern alternative: institutional-grade market data that is easier to access, integrate, and scale. Behind the simplicity of the product is years of deep infrastructure work across exchange connectivity, colocated systems, data normalization, reliability, and customer support.

Today, Databento serves more than 60,000 customers and has achieved 97% enterprise retention, reflecting both the depth of the need and the strength of the product.

As AI becomes central to research, trading, portfolio construction, and risk management, the demand for reliable, developer-friendly market data infrastructure will only grow.

Databento is becoming that layer.

We are thrilled to continue backing Christina, Luca, and the entire Databento team as they build the data infrastructure layer for the next era of investing.

If you are a founder modernizing an outdated but critical industry, we would love to hear from you.

About Lightscape
Lightscape Partners is an early-stage investment firm backing ambitious founders at the pre-seed through Series B stages across compute, robotics, infrastructure software, data, and applied AI. Lightscape's investments include Shield AI, Standard Bots, Etched, Bucket Robotics, Databento, Profitmind, Fuse, Parloa and Articul8, among others.

Lightscape views every investment as a partnership. Depending on each founder’s needs, we drive value through strategic insights, cross-portfolio collaboration, new product and sales opportunities, and by helping to professionalize and scale businesses.

Lightscape Partners was founded by James Rowen and Sohail Khalid, who bring decades of leadership experience operating, scaling and investing in businesses. James was most recently a Partner, Board Member, and COO at Renaissance Technologies. Sohail is a multi-time fintech founder with multiple successful exits to public and private companies. His startups received backing from investors such as Point72, Softbank and others. 

Lightscape Partners' principals are supported by a team of investors, operators, and venture partners with backgrounds from OpenAI, StartX, Oak Hill, Microsoft, Uber ATG, Two Sigma, Intel, CMU, and Stanford, among others. This collective expertise enables Lightscape Partners to provide founders with hands-on support across critical areas such as technical development, go-to-market strategy, operational scaling, and fundraising.

About Databento
Databento makes it simpler and faster to access institutional-grade financial data. With Databento's APIs and no-code browser platform, users can instantly access petabytes of market data—and only pay for what they use. As an official distributor of data from over 75 trading venues, Databento's servers are hosted in each exchange's colocation facilities for low-latency, high-fidelity data capture directly from the source.

Both real-time and historical data are available in over 15 formats, including L1, L2, and L3, with nanosecond-resolution timestamps. Databento has pioneered many industry firsts, including usage-based pricing and the delivery of full-exchange L3 feeds over the internet.