Mills & Reeve advises on $21m raise for Cambridge University data & analytics spin-out
It is the second funding round in two years for London-headquartered BMLL with Optiver as lead investor alongside participation from existing investors FactSet, Nasdaq Ventures and IQ Capital’s Growth Fund. Additional investment was secured from CTC Venture Capital.
The venture capital investment team at Mills & Reeve acted as legal adviser to IQ Capital and FactSet on the round.
The investment follows BMLL’s Series B round which secured $26m strategic investment from FactSet, Nasdaq Ventures and IQ Capital’s Growth Fund in October 2022, with Mills & Reeve advising IQ Capital and FactSet on the transaction.
Snowflake Ventures joined the Series B round in September 2023. Prior to that, BMLL raised $36m through Series A and seed funding rounds.
Founded in 2014 in the machine learning laboratories of the University of Cambridge, BMLL Technologies is the leading, independent provider of harmonised, Level 3, 2 and 1 historical data and analytics to the world’s most sophisticated capital market participants, covering global equities, ETFs and futures.
BMLL offers banks, brokers, asset managers, hedge funds, global exchange groups, academic institutions and regulators immediate and flexible access to the most granular Level 3, 2 and 1 T+1 order book data and advanced pre and post-trade analytics.
It gives users the ability to understand market behaviour, accelerate research, optimise trading strategies and generate alpha more predictably.
Optiver’s investment comes at a time of accelerated growth for BMLL. Over the last 18 month, the company has added more than 40 equities and futures datasets across the globe and today covers 98 per cent of the MSCI All Country World Index.
Optiver is a global market maker founded in Amsterdam, with offices in London, Chicago, Austin, New York, Sydney, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei and Mumbai. Established in 1986, today they are a leading liquidity provider, with close to 2,000 employees in offices around the world.
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.”
Zickie Lim, Head of Venture Capital Investment at Mills & Reeve, said: “It is always a pleasure to see companies on such a high growth trajectory and a privilege to advise on successive funding rounds.
“BMLL, with its cutting edge proposition, dynamic team and industry leading investors is in now in an excellent position to forge ahead with its international expansion.”
Kerry Baldwin, Co-Founder, Managing Partner of IQ Capital, added: “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.”
