Nordic Capital announces the acquisition of BMLL, an independent provider of historical order book data and analytics.
The investment will be made in partnership with the management team of BMLL and minority shareholder Optiver.
The firm says that the investment will advance BMLL’s mission to deliver the market’s trusted base layer of high-quality, analytics-ready historical data across all major exchange-traded asset classes.
Founded in 2014 by Cambridge academics, BMLL delivers the most granular Level 3, 2 and 1 order book data and analytics spanning global equities, ETFs, futures, and US options.
BMLL’s engineering process cleans, standardises, and unifies raw and inconsistent market data from more than 120 venues into a single, globally consistent format.
This enables banks, asset managers, hedge funds, exchanges, and other market participants to easily access and analyse the available view of the market for research, trading, analytics, and compliance.
Delivered via its cloud-native product suite, it provides analytics and AI-ready data ‘out of the box’ that eliminates the need for complex in-house data engineering.
The existing management team at BMLL, led by CEO Paul Humphrey, will continue leading the business and remain as shareholders, ensuring continuity for clients, partners and employees as the company enters its next phase of growth.
Humphrey says: “We’ve spent the past decade investing in our award-winning data engineering capabilities and building the industry’s foundational layer of harmonised order book data.
“The greatest testament and validation of our work is the fact that market participants are now building increasingly sophisticated workflows on top of our data. I am extremely proud of everything our team has delivered over the years, cementing our position as the de-facto historical data and analytics provider to the capital markets.
“Their hard work and unwavering commitment to excellence has made us the category creator and leader we are today.”
David Samuelson, partner at Nordic Capital Advisors, adds: “BMLL stands out for the precision, transparency and insight it brings to market participants. Nordic Capital sees a clear opportunity to invest in content, analytics and partnerships that extend BMLL’s reach globally, helping more firms harness the power of harmonised, high-quality data.
“Leveraging Nordic Capital’s long-standing expertise in capital markets software and data, we will work closely with Paul and his team to seek to expand BMLL’s footprint, elevate the product and analytics offering, and scale distribution and partnerships.”
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