6.7.23-Venture-NYC-Databento

CHRISTINA QI: Awesome. Thanks, Ariana. Hey, everyone. I'm Christina Qi. I'm the founder and CEO of Databento. So my background is that I actually come from-- also, like most MIT people, I come from quantitative finance as well.

So I ran a quant hedge fund for about 10 years. And one of the biggest nightmares we faced was on getting data for our company. We were a very data intensive fund. And data was the backbone. If we had bad data, we would fail. If we had good data, hopefully, we'd do a little bit better.

But the challenge was that getting market data was a nightmare. And I'm sorry. I know that, I think, Refinitiv might be here in the room. But this is a real screenshot from my colleagues in my previous company. When we were trying to get market data, you noticed-- I don't see-- I can't really see the timestamps. But it was over 100 emails over the course of 11 months before we got the data from them that we needed as a start-up.

And it was really frustrating for us because it delayed our launch. Obviously, the price tag is very expensive. It's not very affordable. And so it really impacted the trajectory of our business as a start-up in the financial services industry.

And so we created Databento as a solution to basically help other start-ups get to launch faster in this industry, to help people like us back when we were a hedge fund, to be able to basically get the data we needed instantly. So it's an instant data experience. This is not even a demo. This is literally the actual product, a screenshot of the real thing.

So you can literally go on our website. And the first thing you'll see is a search box. You can just go on there and search for the data that you need, down to the symbol, rather than just talking to a salesperson, going through 100 emails. We just say, here's the product itself. Go search for the data you need. Add to cart. Check out like Amazon. So it's relatively straightforward.

Once you select the data you want, you can also customize it. So we let you choose from pretty much any data format you need to, including full-order book data. If you're a high-frequency trader, you know what that means. You can also get live and historical data. So if you want real-time, intraday data, that is also available. For historical data, you can choose the time range. You can choose whatever formats, encoding, what delivery mechanism you prefer. And that's it. And then you can see the total price there. And you check out. So this saves me 11 months of time, essentially, if I work in the financial industry.

And on top of that, because we sell data on a pay as you go basis, we actually have a feature that's pretty cool which lets managers track your team's data usage. You can see how much data and what data everyone on the team is using. It allows for better collaboration. If you're an analyst, you just joined your team and you're like, what do I do, you can see, oh, hey, you're working on this data set. OK, let's collaborate. So it just provides for transparency that a lot of companies haven't seen before within our industry.

And then on top of that, we do automate the licensing process with all the exchanges actually. So we are registered and licensed. I guess we're licensed to distribute data across currently 30 different financial exchanges today. So we do handle the licensing. And it's all automated on our website. So you can start a license on our website, literally today, and get the license instantly. And then you'll have the live data literally within a couple of minutes. So it's all automated on our website as well.

And then we have a couple of success-- I guess, pilots that we've done so far. We have a lot of customers who are kind of larger firms, like Bank of America, Putnam Investments, et cetera. For them, I think the biggest challenge was just they're such a big team. And licensing is so complex when they're constantly hiring new interns and new analysts every year. And they need data. But data is sold by headcount with all the other vendors.

And so we actually-- since we automate the entire process. It's just a no-brainer. They can automatically on board and off board and scale with us over time. And it gives them transparency into who's using what data on the team. A lot of start-ups use us as well. OpenBB is a great example, where they probably have over 20k users by now. And we are the data backbone for a lot of start-ups that do charting, analytics, that use us for AI.

We don't do any AI or any of that, unfortunately. All we do is we're one step upstream. We provide all the data for all of those AI start-ups out there. So yeah. And that's pretty much it.

Actually, since creating these slides earlier this month, we actually have over 1,000 registered users by now. So we've been growing quite quickly. We launched about six months ago. We have actually 30 full-time employees now as well. And just some photos of our team and stuff so you know we're real. And we're a 100% remote company as well, by the way. So I'm based in Salt Lake City, Utah. But my colleagues are based all around the world. So yeah.

And then in terms of what we're looking for, we're always looking to do pilots with companies that are interested. And of course, if you're interested in just learning more, we'll be out there as well with everyone else and happy to have a chat. And also, our product is available now. So you're welcome to just go in, if you do by chance need market data, and explore for free. So yeah, that's it. Thank you so much, guys.