MayStreet Gets $21M Funding to Support Cost of Data Expansion

New York-based market data infrastructure provider MayStreet is planning a global expansion and market data acquisition spree, after securing $21 million in Series A funding from Next Investors, the private equity division of Credit Suisse Asset Management.

The funding will allow the vendor—which has been almost entirely self-funded to date—to license data from equities markets around the world, to complete its global coverage by expanding its fixed income and treasury datasets, and to begin adding foreign exchange market data later this year. The expansion is in response to demand from clients in the US wanting to expand their geographical and asset class coverage, and from clients in other regions around the world.

Much of the money will be spent on acquiring data, and the hardware and staff required to support it. “There will be a lot of data we’re going to buy, and there will be a lot of staff required to support it,” says MayStreet co-founder and CEO Patrick Flannery. “Data acquisition fees, co-location costs, cross connect hardware, networks required to move data between… exchange co-lo sites…. It definitely costs money to store data. Our raw data is more than 10 petabytes. We collect and store the data, then have to write protocols to maintain it, and apply dividends, and so on.”

Flannery says its focus is not just on nanosecond-level latency but on providing “high fidelity” accurate and complete market data at nanosecond latency that will differentiate MayStreet from its rivals.

“Many legacy providers are missing depth of book data, or their timestamps are from centralized locations…. And if your timestamps aren’t accurate, or if you are missing messages, then your order book won’t be correct,” he says. “We really believe that, for the major markets, we don’t just match the coverage of the big players, we beat it on quality and precision. And as we further build out the platform over the next few years, we’ll be better across all markets and asset classes.”

Flannery also believes the vendor’s technology choices will help it make a more meaningful impact. “Firms are paying a lot of money for data and infrastructure, but finding it hard to extract insight. It’s not just about how quickly a firm can get data from exchanges, but how quickly they can get it into shape where it can deliver insight, and being able to do important things faster,” he says, adding that using cloud technologies allows MayStreet to deliver services at a lower cost than traditional infrastructure-heavy providers. “We can deliver a more timely and agile solution at significantly lower total cost of ownership.”

The data expansion will also entail a significant investment in headcount. The vendor currently employs about 30 people, around 10 of whom were hired in the past six months. Flannery expects to double that total over the next year to 18 months, including hires in sales globally, software engineers and DevOps staff, and senior hires in sales and marketing and a senior VP of development to manage the various teams of new staff.

At a more senior level, MayStreet added two new members to its board of directors: trading technology veteran Rishi Nangalia and Greg Grimaldi, co-head and portfolio manager at Next Investors. Nangalia joined the vendor as an advisor in April. He was previously global head of buy-side trading at Refinitiv, which he joined via then-Thomson Reuters’ acquisition of the Redi execution management system from Goldman Sachs. He spent more than 12 years there, including as head of Redi Technologies, and head of product and business development for the firm’s electronic trading division, where he also sat on the boards of technology providers in which the bank invested.

“The people we’re working with are experienced investors and collaborative partners. They know the questions to ask that will prompt a discussion. It’s very much about a dialogue and exploring ideas, and about iterative evolution. And a big part of a successful business is the speed of that iteration,” Flannery says.

One area where Next Investors’ input has already been instrumental in setting direction—along with Nangalia, given his background in order and execution management systems—is in a new strategy to target the market data needs of EMS and order management system providers, which are dependent on market data, but are unhappy with the solutions available to them, Flannery says.

“So we see this as a higher priority on our development path today than we did, say, a year ago,” he says. “If you see an area that needs a lot of market data, why wouldn’t we target them?”