Alpaca

FinTech Fintech Financial Services Developer APIs Financial Technology and Services Banking and Exchange Investing API Developer Tools Trading Platform Infrastructure Cryptocurrency

San Mateo, CA, USAFounded 2015150+ employeesPrivate

$328.8M raisedSeries B+· last: series d (Jan 2026)· 12 rounds

Backed by(59 investors)

Derayah Financial · Lead Drive Capital · Lead Portage Ventures · Lead 850 Management · Lead Global Brain Corporation · Lead National Investments Company · Lead SBI Group · Lead Spark Capital · Lead Tribe Capital · Lead Unbound · Lead Y Combinator · Lead+10 more

Alpaca is a financial technology company that provides developer-first APIs and brokerage infrastructure for programmatic access to stock, options, and cryptocurrency markets, enabling businesses and individual traders to integrate trading and investing capabilities into their applications. Its platform offers REST, WebSocket, and event-driven interfaces that support algorithmic trading, automated strategy execution, real-time market data, backtesting, and portfolio management workflows.

Founders

YC W19

Hiring Pitch

Alpaca is an API infrastructure and licensed financial services company that allows developers and businesses to offer stock and crypto investing to their end-customers. We work with more than 100 companies across the globe to enable their investing products, and our mission is to provide financial services to everyone on the planet.

Alpaca’s globally distributed team consists of developers, traders, and brokerage business specialists and backed by a group of well-capitalized investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Y Combinator as well as highly experienced industry angel investors and founders. We are also very tech-enthusiastic with notable track records in open source and startup communities.

Tech Stack

TECH STACK

Go, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, React, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis

ENGINEERING TEAM AND PROCESSES

Our engineering team process is somewhere between scrum and kanban. We do daily standup every morning and manage project progress with JIRA. All the code reviews are done in GitHub and release process is seamlessly built around Google Cloud Build, Google Container Registry, GKE, etc. Everyone is encouraged to review others code and have transparent access to any information to improve products from any aspect.

TECHNICAL CHALLENGES

We have built MarketStore (https://github.com/alpacahq/marketstore) in Go from scratch that is time-series database designed for financial data and made it open source. The challenge in our trading system is that you need to deal with real-time market environment to minimize latency while you need to make sure things work correctly as money management system. The requirements and system architecture are totally different and unique which is very exciting to tackle.