Christina Qi recently raised $97 million in Series B financing for her data-driven startup.
Christina Qi boasts an impressive resume. As a 21-year-old undergraduate at MIT, she quietly did something most finance veterans spend decades attempting: She started her own hedge fund. At its height, the fund, Domeyard, traded $7 billion in volume per day.
In 2020, after eight years of running Domeyard, Qi and her fellow founding partners realized that the fund was not scalable, and performance was suffering. “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.
She started fresh that year with a different idea, co-founding and serving as CEO of a new startup called Databento. The company strives to become “the single source of truth for financial information,” Qi explains. It provides market data for researchers at hedge funds and AI labs and now has 70,000 customers, including Nvidia and OpenAI.
Databento raised $97 million in a Series B funding round in July, bringing the startup’s total disclosed funding to about $127 million. Qi has not made the startup’s valuation public. Earlier this year, Databento’s head of quantitative analytics, Lou Lindley, disclosed that the startup had 8-figure annual recurring revenue.
“We grew our revenue almost tenfold from a base well above single-digit millions,” Qi says.
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