In 2021, FIA welcomed eight startups from around the world to its annual fintech showcase, the Innovators Pavilion held at FIA’s Futures and Options Expo in Chicago.
The Innovators Pavilion gives a select group of fintech startups the opportunity to showcase their solutions for the derivatives industry and pitch their services directly to Expo attendees, including senior executives and decision-makers from exchanges, clearinghouses, banks, brokers and trading firms.
"By providing this space for fintech startups to interact with the leading firms in this industry, we aim to accelerate the adoption of new technologies by banks, brokers, exchanges and trading firms,” said Walt Lukken, President and CEO of FIA.
Since 2021, many of these startups have reached significant milestones, from new funding rounds and expanded services to major customer wins and acquisitions.
As FIA gears up for the 2026 Innovators Pavilion, MarketVoice looks back at four firms from the 2021 cohort and how they have developed over the past five years.
Databento – Pay-as-you-go market data
For trading firms, accessing market data has sometimes been expensive, complex and time-consuming. Databento arrived at FIA’s 2021 Innovators Pavilion with a pay-as-you-go alternative, allowing users to buy only the data they needed. That approach won the company the Innovators Pavilion People’s Choice Award that year.
Databento was founded in 2019 by Christina Qi, previously a founding partner at high-frequency trading firm Domeyard. Its technology allows customers to buy data in small, customised quantities, or “byte-sized” pieces, an idea reflected in the company’s name and the concept of selecting items from a bento box.
Databento captures real-time and historical market data directly from exchange colocation sites and delivers it through APIs, flat-file downloads and raw packet capture. Its customers include trading firms, fintechs, commodity and digital asset companies, AI businesses and universities.
When it appeared at FIA Expo in 2021, the business was still at an early stage. By November that year, it had raised more than $27 million across its initial funding rounds. It publicly launched its pay-as-you-go historical data service in April 2023 and has since broadened its offering. Today, Databento provides data across futures, options and equities from more than 70 trading venues. More than 3,000 firms and startups use its APIs.
Five years after its Innovators Pavilion appearance, Databento secured its largest funding round to date, raising $97 million in Series B financing in July 2026. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from DRW Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Tribe Capital, among others.
The funding will support the company’s next stage of expansion. It plans to broaden its coverage across asset classes and geographies and expand to more than 20 data centres worldwide. It has also secured more than 100 petabytes of additional storage capacity, more than doubling its previous footprint.
“Every firm in finance depends on market data, but accessing it has been one of the industry’s longest-running bottlenecks,” Qi said when announcing the investment. “Databento was built by practitioners across quant trading and high-frequency market making to eliminate this overhead, making institutional-grade market data available on demand.”
Paradigm – Institutional liquidity for crypto derivatives
When Paradigm took part in FIA’s Innovators Pavilion in 2021, it was helping institutional traders negotiate large and complex crypto derivatives transactions away from public order books.
Paradigm launched its institutional trading platform in 2019, operating an institutional liquidity network and request-for-quote platform for crypto derivatives. Buyers and sellers use the platform to request quotes and negotiate trades privately, with the resulting transactions handled by supported venues for execution, clearing or settlement.
Paradigm is not itself an exchange, clearinghouse or custodian. The contracts available through its network are created by the venues it supports, while Paradigm provides the connectivity and technology through which counterparties negotiate trades.
In December 2021, Paradigm raised $35 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Jump Capital and Alameda Ventures, valuing the business at $400 million. More than 25 investors participated, including Genesis Trading, QCP Capital, Optiver US, IMC, GSR, Akuna Capital and CMT Digital. At the time, Paradigm said its network served more than 600 institutions and handled $10 billion in monthly trading volume.
Paradigm has since expanded its range of products and settlement venues. Partnerships with Bybit and BitMEX added futures-spread trading, while a subsequent expansion with Bybit enabled users to trade delta-one spreads between spot, perpetual and futures contracts. In May 2024, Paradigm also introduced block trading for options linked to MATIC, SOL and XRP, with the resulting trades executed and cleared on Deribit, broadening its options coverage beyond bitcoin and ether.
In July 2026, Paradigm integrated with Bullish, giving eligible institutional customers access to request-for-quote trading in Bullish’s bitcoin options. Customers can negotiate large and multi-leg strategies as a single block, with the completed trades settling directly on Bullish Exchange.
Paradigm’s website currently lists more than 1,000 network counterparties, including over 50 market makers and 20 prime dealers, with access to more than 120 products across centralised and decentralised venues. The company also reports more than $1 trillion in cumulative trading volume.
Five years after its Innovators Pavilion appearance, Paradigm has evolved from a specialist block-trading network into a broader platform for institutional liquidity and connectivity across centralised and decentralised crypto derivatives markets.
Talos – Institutional digital asset infrastructure
As institutional interest in digital assets grew, financial firms needed the connectivity, controls and workflows they expected in traditional markets. Founded in 2018 by Anton Katz and Ethan Feldman, both of whom came from capital markets technology, Talos was building that infrastructure when it appeared at FIA’s 2021 Innovators Pavilion.
Its platform connects institutions with exchanges, over-the-counter desks and other providers through a single interface, supporting activities from liquidity sourcing and price discovery to execution, reporting, clearing and settlement.
The same year as its Innovators Pavilion appearance, Talos raised $40 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from PayPal Ventures, Fidelity Investments, Galaxy Digital and others. In May 2022, it followed that with a $105 million Series B, led by General Atlantic, with investors including BNY Mellon, Citi, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital and DRW Venture Capital. The round valued Talos at $1.25 billion.
Since then, Talos has expanded beyond its original focus on institutional trading infrastructure. It acquired D3X Systems in 2023, adding portfolio engineering capabilities, followed in 2024 by Cloudwall, strengthening its risk management offering, and Skolem, adding infrastructure for institutional access to decentralised finance.
In July 2025, Talos agreed to acquire Coin Metrics in what it described as the largest acquisition in its history. The deal brought Coin Metrics’ market and blockchain data, analytics and benchmark indexes into the Talos offering, further expanding its capabilities.
The company has also deepened its links with traditional financial markets. In 2023, Talos added crypto options trading with Deribit and integrated with CME Group, allowing clients to trade CME Bitcoin and Ether futures through the platform. In October 2025, it integrated its order and execution management system with BlackRock’s Aladdin platform, allowing BlackRock traders to route crypto-asset orders directly to Talos.
In January 2026, Talos raised a further $45 million in a Series B extension, bringing the total Series B to $150 million and its post-money valuation to approximately $1.5 billion. Talos said its revenue and number of clients had each roughly doubled annually over the previous two years.
Its expansion has continued in 2026. In March, Talos and Nasdaq announced a partnership connecting Talos’s digital asset infrastructure with Nasdaq’s Calypso and Trade Surveillance platforms, with the companies developing an integrated solution for managing tokenised collateral. The partnership is intended to bring digital assets within existing risk, collateral and compliance workflows.
In July 2026, Talos expanded into prediction markets. The company integrated with Kalshi, allowing select institutional clients to trade the exchange’s event contracts and crypto perpetuals through the same Talos interface they use for digital assets. An expanded integration with OKX followed in September, giving eligible clients onboarded with OKX access to its options markets alongside spot and futures.
The expansion has coincided with rising activity on the platform. In August 2026, Talos said cumulative notional trading volume through its platform had passed $1 trillion since inception.
Credora (formerly X-Margin) – Bringing risk ratings to DeFi
When Credora, then known as X-Margin, took part in FIA’s Innovators Pavilion in 2021, it was developing technology to help lenders assess credit risk in digital asset markets without requiring borrowers to disclose sensitive trading and portfolio information. Its approach earned it the runner-up award in FIA’s Innovator of the Year competition.
Founded in 2019, the company developed technology that combined financial information with real-time portfolio data to assess borrowers’ creditworthiness. The technology was designed to keep the underlying data private while allowing lenders to monitor changes in a borrower’s risk. This addressed a challenge in crypto markets, where lenders needed enough information to assess counterparties while trading firms were reluctant to disclose commercially sensitive positions.
In August 2022, X-Margin became the company rebranded as Credora, a name intended to reflect its role as a “credit oracle” providing credit assessments and risk monitoring across centralised and decentralised digital asset markets. By September that year, Credora said its technology had helped facilitate more than $800 million in uncollateralised loans across more than 100 borrowers and lenders and was monitoring more than $4 billion of borrower assets.
The following year, Credora raised $6 million in strategic funding, with S&P Global and Coinbase Ventures among the major investors. Other participants included Spartan, Amber Group, CMT Digital, HashKey, GSR and KuCoin Ventures. The round brought its total venture funding to more than $16 million. By then, Credora said it had facilitated more than $1 billion in loans.
Its focus subsequently expanded into ratings for decentralised finance. In February 2025, Credora launched the Credora Network, a consensus ratings protocol designed to standardise risk assessment across DeFi. It brought together input from risk specialists to produce ratings published on-chain. Early participants included Amber, Fasanara, GSR, HashKey and more than 20 other institutions.
In June last year, Credora opened its institutional-grade risk ratings and metrics to the wider DeFi community, including coverage of 100 Morpho vaults and metrics to help users assess liquidity and other risks.
Later in 2025, RedStone, which provides price data to blockchain applications, acquired Credora for an undisclosed sum. The deal brought together RedStone’s price feeds and Credora’s risk ratings, with the aim of giving DeFi protocols and users both price and risk information through the same infrastructure.
The acquisition brought Credora into RedStone’s wider oracle infrastructure, and the business was renamed Credora by RedStone. The acquisition marked the latest stage in Credora’s development from privacy-preserving credit assessments for crypto borrowers into a provider of standardised risk ratings for DeFi markets.
