Data analytics provider BMLL announced that Optiver has joined the board of investors after the latest funding round, which raised $21m million led by the liquidity provider. The round included co-participation from existing investors FactSet, Nasdaq Ventures and IQ Capital’s Growth Fund; with additional investment from CTC Venture Capital.
BMLL provides data and analytics that cover global equities, ETFs and futures from 100+ global trading venues, at Level 3 granularity, which is used by banks, brokers, asset managers, hedge funds, global exchange groups, academic institutions and regulators. Most recently, BMLL added over five years of nanosecond unconflated Options Price Reporting Authority (OPRA) options data.
Paul Humphrey, CEO of BMLL, said in a statement: “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 in a statement: “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.
Kerry Baldwin, co-founder and managing partner of IQ Capital, said in a statement: “Through our Growth Fund, we have a great opportunity to support outperforming companies in our portfolio…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 at CTC, said in a statement: “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 harmonization layer.”
The latest investment follows BMLL’s Series B round, which secured a $26 million 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 $36 million through Series A and seed funding rounds.