- Optiver leads latest funding round, with continued backing from existing investors Nasdaq Ventures, FactSet and IQ Capital’s Growth Fund
- CTC Venture Capital joins the funding round as additional investor
- Optiver investment firmly cements buy-to-build model for deploying best-of-breed historical market data sources into existing, production-ready environment
- BMLL historical data to power Optiver algo development, execution analysis and surveillance
BMLL, the leading, independent provider of harmonised, historical Level 3, 2 and 1 data and analytics across global equity, ETFs and futures markets, today announced that Optiver has joined the board of investors. The latest funding round raised $21m with Optiver as the lead investor and co-participation from existing investors FactSet, Nasdaq Ventures and IQ Capital’s Growth Fund; with additional investment from CTC Venture Capital.
Optiver’s investment comes at a time of continued accelerated growth for BMLL. BMLL has built up significant global traction by offering data and analytics that cover global Equities, ETFs and Futures from 100+ global trading venues, at Level 3 granularity. Used by banks, brokers, asset managers, hedge funds, global exchange groups, academic institutions and regulators, BMLL enables market participants to understand how markets truly behave.
Over the last 18 months alone, BMLL added more than 40 equities and futures datasets across the globe and today covers 98% of the MSCI All Country World Index. Most recently, BMLL added over five years of nanosecond unconflated OPRA options data. Over the same period, BMLL has grown its global footprint, opened a US-based presence and significantly increased its client roster. In addition, in Q1 2024 BMLL started offering Level 2 and Level 1 historical data to address the shortcomings in historical data quality from large, incumbent real-time providers.
Paul Humphrey, CEO of BMLL, said: “We are thrilled to welcome Optiver as a significant shareholder and are delighted to have the ongoing support from our existing investors who have backed the latest round. We have an incredibly diverse team of supporting investors, with deep-seated global market and technology expertise, and we are poised to scale the business further, as we build out and scale our data feed business and futures coverage and wider product offering globally.”
Pat Cooney, Managing Director of Optiver Europe, said: "Optiver traders, quantitative researchers and developers rely on historical data to shape our pricing strategies, making data science and research a key part of our mission to improve markets. The high quality of BMLL's data, their advanced analytics tools and their best-in-class team have together significantly improved our ability to generate insights that influence our strategies. We believe these benefits can extend beyond our firm and provide substantial value to other market participants as well."
In conjunction with the investment, Optiver is now using BMLL’s historical Level 3 Level 2 and 1 data to power its algo development, execution analysis, surveillance, market validation and market structure insights.
Paul Humphrey, CEO of BMLL, added: “Optiver’s investment and their commitment to integrating our historical market data into their advanced trading environment underscores the quality of BMLL’s market data products as best-in-class."
By using BMLL‘s historical data capabilities, rather than building their own, Optiver leads the way in cementing the buy-to-build trend when it comes to market data. Firms no longer need to own, engineer and store large data sets when high quality, curated historical data is available and ready to use. The global trend of firms hiring quants and having them spend 80% of their time cleaning and organising poor quality data has its days numbered, certainly if firms want to save significant time and costs. Instead, firms can differentiate themselves by what their quants do with the data, and the products they build, using this quality data in order to gain a competitive advantage”.
Kerry Baldwin, Co-Founder, Managing Partner of IQ Capital, commented: “Through our Growth Fund, we have a great opportunity to support outperforming companies in our portfolio. We’re proud to have backed BMLL from the start and are impressed with the company’s track record and global footprint to date. We look forward to contributing to its future success as the company expands its data coverage and global product capabilities”.
CTC Venture Capital, the venture capital arm of proprietary trading firm Chicago Trading Company (CTC), also joins the investment round. With core focuses on trading and technology, CTC is a global liquidity provider within a broad spectrum of asset classes that include Equities, Indexes, Interest Rates, Commodities, and Credit. The firm uses its deep expertise in pricing and managing risk to enhance the transparency and efficiency of markets.
George Kalant, Venture Capital Lead, Chicago Trading Company: “As we aim to select investment opportunities that have strategic alignment to existing or prospective business verticals within CTC, we look forward to this new investment partnership. From a trading firm perspective, BMLL is uniquely positioned to offer a strong value proposition given their extensive data warehouse and supporting harmonisation layer.”
The latest investment follows BMLL’s Series B round, which secured a $26m strategic investment from FactSet, Nasdaq Ventures and IQ Capital’s Growth Fund in October 2022. Snowflake Ventures joined the Series B round in September 2023. Prior to that, BMLL raised $36m through Series A and seed funding rounds.
Jefferies LLC acted as financial advisor and Taylor Wessing LLP acted as legal advisor to BMLL in connection with this transaction. Mills & Reeve LLP acted as legal advisor to FactSet and IQ Capital.
