BMLL Secures $21m in Funding with Optiver as Lead Investor

BMLL, the provider of harmonised, historical Level 3, 2, and 1 market data and analytics across global equities, ETFs, futures and options markets, has announced a new $21 million funding round led by Optiver, the Amsterdam-based global market maker and liquidity provider. The round also included participation from existing investors FactSet, Nasdaq Ventures, and IQ Capital’s Growth Fund, with additional investment from CTC Venture Capital.

Optiver’s involvement marks a significant step in BMLL’s continued growth. BMLL has established a strong global presence, offering detailed data analytics from over 100 trading venues and covering 98% of the MSCI All Country World Index. Over the past 18 months, the company has expanded its data coverage, adding over 40 equities and futures datasets worldwide, and recently incorporated over five years of nanosecond unconflated OPRA options data. The firm has also broadened its global footprint with a new US-based presence and expanded its client portfolio.

“Optiver’s decision to partner with us shows they trust BMLL and our processes,” Paul Humphrey, CEO of BMLL, tells TradingTech Insight. “Normally, firms would hire teams of quants to buy raw data and spend their time engineering, organising, and cleaning it before building their strategies. Now, they’re able to use our data as the base layer, freeing up their talent to focus on higher-value tasks. We’ve been saying for years that 80% of a quant’s time is spent scrubbing and organising data, but those days are numbered. When firms of Optiver’s caliber come to BMLL and recognise the quality of our normalisation—no lost fields, no gaps or spikes—it signals a shift. It’s a strong endorsement of our capabilities, and no doubt other sophisticated firms are looking at this and will wonder why they’re not doing the same.”

In early 2024, BMLL began offering historical Level 2 and Level 1 data to address gaps in the quality of historical market data from incumbent providers. Optiver will leverage BMLL’s historical data across all levels to support algorithm development, execution analysis, surveillance, market validation, and market structure insights. The firm’s decision to use BMLL’s data aligns with a growing industry trend of buying rather than building data infrastructure. This allows firms to focus on developing products and insights rather than managing large datasets, enabling significant time and cost savings.

Pat Cooney, Managing Director of Optiver Europe, comments: “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.”

“Owning data is no longer the differentiator; it’s what you do with that data that sets you apart,” says Humphrey. “In today’s trading landscape, whether you’re a quant, mathematician, engineer, or data scientist, they’re all converging into a similar role. Imagine if the industry’s talent could spend their time doing incredible things with this data, rather than having to create it—that’s the significant shift we’re seeing. It used to be that owning data like this was the secret sauce, and firms would dedicate entire teams to creating it. But we’ve been on a mission to democratise access to this data, which requires a non-trivial amount of engineering to get right. When firms as sophisticated as Optiver say, ‘Yes, this is good enough for us,’ it’s a game-changer. They can then focus on building their strategies and putting their brilliant people to work on what truly matters. This represents a major shift in how market participants think about data and its role in their competitive edge.”

CTC Venture Capital, part of Chicago Trading Company, the proprietary trading firm and liquidity provider across a broad range of asset classes, also joins this latest funding round and brings its trading and technology expertise to the investment. “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,” comments George Kalant, Venture Capital Lead at Chicago Trading Company. “From a trading firm perspective, BMLL is uniquely positioned to offer a strong value proposition given their extensive data warehouse and supporting harmonisation layer.”

BMLL plans to leverage this new funding round to further expand its product offerings and enhance data quality across different asset classes and geographies, says Humphrey.

“Our mission hasn’t changed: we aim for full coverage in equities, and we’re almost there, covering 98% of the MSCI All Country World Index,” states Humphrey. “We’re also expanding our footprint in the futures markets. Currently, we cover ICE, CME, and Eurex, but we receive daily requests for other futures markets, so we’re about to go on a growth spurt there. One key aspect of this announcement that shouldn’t be overlooked is that, for the first time, we’re officially sharing that we have options data. We’ve acquired over five years of nanosecond unconflated OPRA data and are planning to build a series of conflated products from it, as well as map it to various partners’ real-time feeds. You’ll be hearing more about that soon, but expanding into options is a natural evolution for us. So, BMLL will have coverage across equities, ETFs, futures, and options—that’s where we’re heading.”

Jefferies LLC acted as financial advisor and Taylor Wessing LLP served as legal advisor to BMLL for this transaction, while Mills & Reeve LLP advised FactSet and IQ Capital.

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