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The Venture Codex

DRW Venture Capital

540 W Madison St, Suite 2500, Chicago, IL, 60661, United States

Overview

DRW Venture Capital, an arm of principal trading firm DRW, invests primarily in financial and enterprise technology. Many of our portfolio companies benefit from our engagement beyond capital: as a client, as a liquidity provider, through our review of new products, and through our deep industry expertise. As a firm with no outside investors, we have a flexible mandate to deploy capital and often tap into our core business to help companies grow. We’re powered by the people, technology and ideas of DRW, and those we invest in may leverage it all. DRW has diversified business expertise and deep networks in trading and technology, real estate investment, cryptocurrencies and product development — a unique advantage.

Total investments
56
Lead investments
16
Investments · 12mo
11
Active investors
2

Sector focus

  • Financial Services
  • FinTech
  • Venture Capital
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Investment portfolio

  • Silicon Data

    Participated · Series A · Aug 2026

    Silicon Data provides pricing indices, performance benchmarks, forward curves and market intelligence for the AI compute economy, aimed at buyers, sellers, exchanges and financial institutions. It has built a portfolio of nine financial-grade indices covering GPUs and LLMs and offers alternative datasets that track supply, demand, utilization, pricing and economics across compute. The company has over 1,000 registered users and counts semiconductor manufacturers, AI model builders and financial institutions among its daily users. SiliconMark, a product funded by the Series A, benchmarks real-world GPU cluster performance to normalize output differences driven by networking, topology and configuration. Silicon Data spent two years building the pricing and performance history needed to support a futures market and is positioned to be the reference layer for cash-settled GPU futures being planned by CME Group. Financially, the company raised a $4.7 million seed in March 2025 and completed a $30.5 million Series A initial closing to fund its next phase of product and market expansion.

  • Databento

    Participated · Series B · Jul 2026

    Databento provides a unified API delivering real-time and historical market data across futures, options, and equities, owning the market data stack end-to-end and colocating servers at exchanges to capture data directly. The company emphasizes performance, reliability, and a developer-friendly experience, and reports more than doubled active API users in recent months. Financially, Databento reached profitability with 24 employees, grew revenue 6.65x year over year, and has maintained over 97% enterprise logo retention since inception. It plans to expand its infrastructure footprint to more than 20 data centers worldwide and has secured over 100 petabytes of additional storage capacity. Databento aims to broaden coverage across asset classes and geographies as part of its growth strategy.

  • Rowan

    Led · Seed · Mar 2026

    Rowan combines advanced AI systems with hands-on human Guides to help owner-run companies become buyer-ready by organizing financials, documenting operations, and improving cash flow and predictability. The platform connects aligned buyers and sellers while providing structured, transparent transition processes and Fortune 500–style capabilities to small businesses. Co-founders include CEO Steven Glod and Christopher Weaver, who describe the service as addressing a growing small-business succession gap as owners age. Rowan plans to expand its suite of proprietary AI tools and grow its team and infrastructure following the seed raise. The company intends to use its offerings to unlock more value for sellers and support smoother ownership transitions for buyers.

  • Crossover Markets Group

    Participated · Series B · Mar 2026

    Crossover Markets builds and operates CROSSx, one of the industry’s first execution-only electronic communication networks (ECNs) for spot cryptocurrency trading. The platform offers single-digit-microsecond matching, anonymous and disclosed bilateral liquidity pools, advanced order types and FIX connectivity designed for high-frequency and algorithmic strategies. Since launch, CROSSx has processed more than $50 billion in notional volume across 12 million trades and now supports nearly 100 live institutional participants. Headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, the company positions itself as a neutral execution layer that eliminates conflicts of interest common on centralized exchanges. With its new capital, Crossover plans to enhance the CROSSx technology stack, expand global operations and deepen integrations with institutional partners such as Tradeweb. Management believes the collaboration with Tradeweb will extend the firm’s global distribution and embed traditional electronic-trading standards into digital assets. The firm’s growth strategy centers on servicing the rapidly converging traditional-finance and crypto markets while maintaining best-in-class speed, transparency and execution quality.

  • TRM Labs

    Participated · Series C · Feb 2026

    TRM Labs develops blockchain analytics and artificial-intelligence software that enables law-enforcement agencies, national-security organizations, financial institutions, and cryptocurrency businesses to trace funds, identify illicit activity, and build investigative cases. Its platforms link on-chain and off-chain data to construct comprehensive threat pictures and streamline financial-crime risk management tasks such as alert disposition and exposure assessment. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company also operates hubs in Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., London, and Singapore. With the newly raised capital, TRM plans to deepen its AI capabilities for spotting and disrupting criminal networks, strengthen connections between crypto activity and real-world adversaries, and grow its roster of AI researchers, data scientists, engineers, and domain experts. The roadmap emphasizes accelerating product development that lets institutions manage financial-crime risk more efficiently. No revenue or user figures were disclosed in the article.

Team