BMLL, which provides historical Level 3 data and analytics to the capital markets, has secured $26 million in Series B investment from Nasdaq Ventures, FactSet, IQ Capital’s Growth Fund and ACF Investors, among others.
The firm plans to use the funding to support the acquisition of new datasets globally, as well as to build on its North American presence with the launch of a new office in New York.
“The race for speed is over and the race for data and analytics is on,” CEO Paul Humphrey told The TRADE. “When we’re speaking to our customers in the US and UK, it is clear that there is an increasing demand from trading firms for analytics that help them understand how markets truly behave. At the same time there is a real lack of quant resources to carry out the data analytics necessary to make better trading decisions.”
The orderbook data and analytics provided by BMLL are used by clients including banks, brokers, asset managers, hedge funds and global exchanges to derive predictive insights, back-test strategies and acquire insights into how their markets behave. The firm recently launched BMLL Vantage, a no-code data visualisation tool for European and US equities and ETFs; and has been scaling up its US presence for some time now.
Earlier in the year, Tim Baker was hired as a senior advisor in New York to prepare ground, while in November 2020, the firm opened up its Data Lab and Data Feed to US market participants via the Data In Harmony (DIH) network; as well as partnering with Crux Analytics to deliver data and analytics to its US client base.
“For the US particularly, our historic data now goes back almost seven years. This has led to increasing demand for our offering and is one of the reasons we will be opening an office in New York,” Humphrey revealed to The TRADE.
“We have seen significant pick up in the US over the past 12 months, for example NYU’s Quant Team uses the BMLL Data Lab to carry out research on the futures market at the university’s Mathematics in Finance Program. BMLL has also extended its product offering to provide Level 3 Futures data, recently co-hosting an industry webinar with Eris Innovations, a product development company that created interest rate swap futures listed by CME Group.”
BMLL aims to democratise access to granular Level 3 data – something that historically been seen as the preserve of more sophisticated firms, those with significant budgets and data engineering capabilities.
“We take care of the data science aspect and are able to offer our clients data and analytics capabilities ‘as a service’ to help them derive predictive analytics, backtest trading strategies or generate alpha,” said Humphrey. “Essentially, we help market participants make better trading decisions – at speed, and scale.”
The firm has had a busy year – growing its revenues over the past 12 months, and taking on board new clients including Kepler Cheuvreux, Aquis Exchange, SIX Group and the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, as well as expanding into the futures market.