Databento CEO Christina Qi speaks with me in a Fortt Knox 1:1 on rebuilding market data from the hardware up. Her own servers colocated inside exchanges, sold self-serve instead of through salespeople – now about 80,000 customers, 38 employees, a $97M Series B. Born in China, she moved to Logan, Utah at three, and her parents waited tables at the town's one Chinese restaurant while earning master's degrees. Full Fortt Knox conversation linked in the comments:
Jon Fortt, this is a truly awesome future to live into. Thanks for hosting this discussion. Dive into the decentralized vogon.cloud/ecosystem and consider interviewing Sean Brehm, whose work with physics-bound PQC enables sovereign IoT and the individual human identity who hold authority over it, securely and privately, to be the growth engine of Web5 when we are paid for being ourselves after decades of data extraction. To me, this is a pathway toward an apolitical, global basis of income that is rightfully ours-the same way crude oil is paid for at the point of extraction. However, in this instance, the refining happens within the network, the value is increased, the buyers are able to attain higher quality data to make better decisions in a fast-paced marketplace and engage a real-time data-to-information pipeline. All the while, an individual consents to every sale that includes any piece of the data they generated. Instead of checking the box once and handing over authority and agency, the data originator has choice and agency from their personal data vault to global markets This return of value for digital labor is potentially higher than any forthcoming government payout administered via UBI program
Christina’s story always reminds me how much the “ground‑up” approach still matters, even as AI‑driven analytics dominate the conversation in 2026. Building the data pipeline from the hardware layer gave Databento the kind of latency edge that most “cloud‑first” vendors still chase, and the self‑serve model you’ve kept intact clearly resonates—80 000 customers is no small feat for a team of 38. I’m curious: as you scale the colocation footprint, how are you balancing the push for ever‑lower latency with the rising cost pressures of edge compute, especially given the recent chip shortages we’ve all felt since 2024? Also, your personal journey—from Logan’s small‑town hustle to steering a $97 M Series B—adds a human layer to a tech story that often feels abstract. It’s a good reminder that the people behind the servers are just as critical as the servers themselves. Thanks for sharing the full Fortt Knox chat; I’ll give it a listen.
Thank you for interviewing me Jon!
Thanks for sharing your story, Christina Qi, fellow MIT alum ✨
Market data is easy to take for granted, but it's one of the foundations of every trading decision.👍🏻
Oh very cool - this is one if not the first type of collaborative post I see on LinkedIn - will definitely catch this video later!!
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/29/christina-qi-databento-ceo-a-fortt-knox-conversation.html