John Steffens of Spring Mountain Capital and previous investors Altos Ventures, Startup Ventures and Peter Caswell also participated. The US firm plans to use the money to boost its sales and marketing operations as well as develop its cloud platform, taking advantage of an explosion in market data.

The rise of high-frequency trading, venue fragmentation and the emergence of new financial instruments have all led to a massive increase in the amounts of market data. Xignite claims that the volumes are crushing financial services firms' IT departments.

It hopes to take advantage with its platform, enabling firms to push this big data to the cloud where it is available globally, on-demand to any application with an Internet connection, allowing IT departments to focus on building the next generation of apps instead.

The Xignite model transforms market data infrastructure into a utility just like electricity, says the vendor, with businesses buying online and plugging applications into the cloud in minutes.

Meanwhile, exchanges and trading venues that put their market data onto the XigniteOnDemand private-label platform, such as Nasdaq OMX and CME Group, achieve immediate, global distribution, claims the vendor.

Stephane Dubois, CEO, Xignite, says: "Every day financial markets generate one-hundred times more data than they did just five years ago. At the same time, the one-size-fits-all terminal model is breaking down as businesses drive productivity through simpler, nimbler fit-for-purpose apps. Cloud-based market data is the only solution that can bridge this gap."