Alpaca Hits $1.15B Valuation and Expands Self-Clearing API Infrastructure

Alpaca raised a $150 million Series D funding round at a $1.15 billion valuation, crossing into unicorn status and reporting more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Led by Drive Capital with participation from Citadel Securities, Kraken, and BNP Paribas venture unit Opera Tech Ventures, the round was accompanied by a $40 million credit line to back the company's balance sheet as it expands its clearing, custody, and developer APIs.

Founded in 2015, Alpaca operates as a self-clearing broker-dealer and custody provider that lets fintechs, banks, and algorithmic traders connect directly to global capital markets. The company provides programmatic access to US equities, ETFs, options, fixed income, and cryptocurrencies via REST, WebSocket, and event-driven interfaces. Through its licenses and memberships—including DTCC, OCC, and FICC memberships, as well as membership in Nasdaq—the platform manages custody, trade execution, and settlement for partner companies, which include Kraken, Binance, Coinbase, and Klarna.

Internalizing Core Financial Rails

Alpaca was founded by chief executive officer Yoshi Yokokawa and chief technology officer Hitoshi Harada. Yokokawa previously worked in securitized products at Lehman Brothers and Nomura before trading full-time and leading deep-learning software startups. Harada brought background in distributed databases as a former database kernel architect at Pivotal, a PostgreSQL contributor, and an engineer at Greenplum Software.

Rather than reselling third-party clearing services or outsourcing regulatory mechanics, the founders built their technical and regulatory architecture in-house. Speaking on The Archive podcast, Yokokawa explained that relying on third-party vendors limits developer flexibility: "If you're relying on other like licensed providers that you're outsourcing licenses or something, those are the people who's going to say, 'No, you cannot do that.'" Internalizing the brokerage licenses and core mainframe systems allowed the team to deliver sub-penny fractional trading down to multiple decimal places and rapidly iterate on core APIs.

On the technical side, Alpaca built MarketStore, an open-source time-series database written in Go specifically designed for real-time financial market data. The engineering stack runs on Google Cloud Platform, using Kubernetes (GKE), PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, and React. Systems operate under strict low-latency requirements while maintaining exact state across financial accounts and transactional ledgers.

Expansion Across Tokenized Assets, German Equities, and Prediction Markets

Alpaca's footprint has widened across both asset classes and international exchanges. As reported by TradingView, the company plans to launch a prime brokerage business in the first quarter of financial year 2027 to bridge traditional securities and digital asset markets. Addressing the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore, Yokokawa reported that Alpaca holds more than $3.5 billion in underlying US shares custodying tokenized stock products across 10 issuers, powering over 90% of tokenized US equities. To resolve settlement inefficiencies between crypto rails and traditional markets, the firm built its Instant Tokenization Network (ITN), which has processed $6 billion in transaction volume.

Beyond digital assets, Alpaca has extended access to international stock exchanges. Following its acquisition of UK-based WealthKernel, the company launched trading for German-listed equities on Deutsche Börse's Xetra, with plans to add the London Stock Exchange, Euronext Paris, Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and Saudi Exchange.

Alpaca has also branched into event contracts. According to finance.biggo.com, Alpaca Derivatives partnered with CFTC-regulated prediction market Kalshi to allow institutional and retail broker clients to integrate event contracts into their platforms. In artificial intelligence workflows, Yokokawa noted in an interview with the New York Stock Exchange that OpenAI integrated Alpaca's market data directly into ChatGPT to feed real-time pricing to conversational interfaces and automated agents.

Engineering Growth and Infrastructure Roles

To manage its trading volumes, global regulatory compliance, and clearing infrastructure, Alpaca is hiring across its remote software engineering and data organizations.

On the trading infrastructure side, the Senior or Staff+ Software Engineer - Trading works on the algorithmic trading platform supporting high-performance retail trading, requiring low-latency optimization and distributed systems design. To support clearing in-house, the Senior Software Engineer - Clearing & Securities Finance builds and scales systems for the clearing team to deliver a modern clearing and settlements platform as part of a self-clearing initiative.

Core ledger integrity is maintained by the Senior/Staff+ Software Engineer - Ledger Team, who designs and maintains the system that serves as the source of truth for all transactional data across the ecosystem to ensure a complete, correct view of every account for reporting and compliance. Onboarding across dozens of jurisdictions is handled by the Senior or Staff+ Software Engineer - Identity, who builds platform capabilities for high-automation identity verification and account management globally. Additionally, the Senior Analytics Engineer leads the transformation layer of the data platform using dbt and Trino on Google Cloud Platform, integrating data from transactional databases and API logs to build models for finance, operations, and leadership.

Open Positions at Alpaca

See all open roles at Alpaca