Alpaca Drives Global Structural Growth

Alpaca’s rise from a developer-focused startup to a unicorn-valued infrastructure provider says as much about the changing shape of global finance as it does about the company itself. With its latest $150m Series D funding round, valuing the business at $1.15bn, the US-based fintech has secured both the capital and the validation needed to press ahead with an ambitious plan: to make brokerage infrastructure programmable, global and accessible in a way traditional financial plumbing never was.

At its core, Alpaca is not trying to build a consumer brand or compete directly with retail brokers. Its proposition is more fundamental. The company provides regulated brokerage infrastructure through APIs, allowing fintechs, financial institutions and developers to embed trading, custody and compliance into their own products without having to build those capabilities from scratch. In doing so, Alpaca positions itself as a horizontal layer underpinning a growing number of investment platforms around the world.

That focus on APIs is not a late pivot but the foundation on which the company was built. When I spoke with Alpaca’s co-founder and chief executive Yoshi Yokokawa, he was clear that the starting point was a simple frustration. Financial markets had become increasingly electronic, yet access to them remained locked behind rigid systems designed for banks, not software developers. If payments could be abstracted into code and scaled globally, why not brokerage?

That question shaped Alpaca’s architecture. Rather than bolt APIs onto an existing brokerage, the company built a brokerage designed to be accessed programmatically. Trading, clearing, settlement, custody and regulatory compliance are exposed as modular services. For partners, that removes a huge operational burden. For Alpaca, it creates a business that scales with usage rather than end users.

The timing has proved favourable. As fintechs have matured, many have moved beyond payments and savings into investing, wealth management and more complex financial products. At the same time, traditional institutions have recognised that building modern digital experiences internally is slow and costly. Alpaca sits between these two forces, supplying infrastructure to both startups and established players that want speed without sacrificing regulatory rigour.

The latest funding round reflects that momentum. Led by Drive Capital and backed by a broad mix of strategic and financial investors from across capital markets and fintech, the raise also includes a sizeable credit facility to support balance-sheet flexibility. It follows a Series C round earlier in 2025 that was aimed squarely at international expansion. Together, the capital gives Alpaca room to invest heavily in regulatory licences, local market expertise and product depth.

Regulation is where Alpaca’s strategy becomes most demanding. Brokerage is not a borderless business. Each jurisdiction brings its own rules around custody, capital requirements, client money and data protection. Rather than attempting to serve markets from a single regulatory base, Alpaca has chosen the harder path of building compliant operations market by market. That is capital intensive and slow, but it creates a moat that is difficult for less regulated competitors to cross.

This regulatory seriousness is also central to how Alpaca differentiates itself from the wave of “embedded finance” providers that focus on lighter-touch products. Alpaca is a self-clearing broker-dealer in the US and is extending similar capabilities elsewhere. That allows it to control more of the value chain, improve execution quality and offer partners a more resilient service. It also makes the platform viable for institutional use cases, not just retail trading apps.

Product expansion has followed a similar logic. Alpaca started with US equities trading, but it has steadily broadened its offering to include exchange-traded funds, options, fixed income products, securities lending and high-yield cash solutions. Market data services and extended trading hours reflect how partner platforms want to differentiate themselves. More recently, the company has been exploring how traditional market infrastructure can coexist with tokenised assets and on-chain settlement, without drifting into regulatory grey areas.

What is striking is that much of this expansion has been driven by partner demand rather than top-down roadmap planning. In our conversation, Yoshi described Alpaca less as a product company and more as a platform that responds to how developers and institutions actually want to build. That mindset shows up in the way Alpaca invests in documentation, tooling and community. Developers are treated as first-class users, not an afterthought.

Culture plays an important role here. Alpaca has grown into a globally distributed organisation, yet it places unusual emphasis on shared values and clarity of communication. Decisions are expected to be data-driven, but empathy and long-term thinking are also baked into how teams operate. That matters when a company is balancing the demands of regulators, enterprise clients and a developer community that values transparency above all else.

The broader market context is supportive, though not without risk. Interest in retail investing remains structurally higher than it was a decade ago, even if volumes fluctuate with market cycles. At the same time, governments and regulators are paying closer attention to how investment products are distributed, particularly to less sophisticated investors. For infrastructure providers like Alpaca, that scrutiny is a double-edged sword. It raises compliance costs, but it also favours firms that have invested early in doing things properly.

Competition is intensifying. Other infrastructure providers are eyeing the same opportunity to become the “plumbing” of modern investing. Legacy players are modernising, and new entrants are emerging with narrower, faster offerings. Alpaca’s bet is that being a fully regulated, self-clearing platform with a genuinely global ambition will matter more over time than short-term speed or pricing advantages.

The challenge now is execution. Scaling regulatory operations across multiple jurisdictions while maintaining platform reliability is difficult. Supporting partners whose own growth can be volatile adds another layer of complexity. And as Alpaca grows, it must ensure that the simplicity it offers externally does not mask growing internal complexity.

Yet the direction of travel is clear. Alpaca is not trying to predict where investing will go next. Instead, it is building infrastructure flexible enough to support many possible futures, whether that is traditional brokerage, tokenised assets or models that do not yet exist. In that sense, its ambition is less about owning the customer relationship and more about enabling others to innovate on top of stable, compliant foundations.

With fresh capital in place and a strategy that aligns closely with how financial services are being rebuilt in code, Alpaca enters its next phase with confidence. The task now is to turn that confidence into durable global scale, without losing the developer-first clarity that got the company here in the first place.