Alpaca

Alpaca is a developer-first financial infrastructure company that provides APIs enabling individuals, algorithmic traders, and fintech businesses to embed stock, options, ETF, and cryptocurrency trading into their applications. Founded by Yoshi Yokokawa and Hitoshi Harada, the Silicon Valley-based company operates as a self-clearing broker-dealer through its subsidiary Alpaca Securities LLC, which holds FINRA and SIPC membership. Its crypto operations run through Alpaca Crypto LLC, a FinCEN-registered money services business.

The Problem Alpaca Solves

Traditional brokerage infrastructure is fragmented, expensive, and closed. Building a trading application from scratch requires navigating clearing relationships, regulatory compliance, market data licensing, and custody arrangements — a stack that historically took years and tens of millions of dollars to assemble. Alpaca collapses this into a unified API layer, allowing a developer to go from idea to live trading accounts in days. Its stated vision is to make financial markets accessible to more than eight billion people globally.

Core Products

Alpaca's platform is organized around several primary API surfaces:

Trading API gives individual traders and algorithmic systems programmatic access to US equities, ETFs, options, and cryptocurrencies. It supports commission-free trading, paper trading for strategy testing, margin trading up to 4x intraday and 2x overnight, extended hours sessions, and 24/5 US equity access. Order processing is advertised at 1.5 milliseconds with 99.99 percent system uptime. A FIX API launched in 2024 targets institutional and high-frequency traders requiring complex multi-leg strategies, VWAP, and TWAP execution.

Broker API is Alpaca's primary B2B product. It allows fintech companies, neobanks, challenger brokers, and investment apps to embed full-service brokerage into their own products. The API handles account creation, KYC verification, ACH and wire funding, trade execution, and portfolio data — all under the fintechs' own branding. The OmniSub sub-accounting platform extends this to support fund-level and advisor-level account structures. As of mid-2025, Alpaca served more than 200 financial clients across 40 countries and powered over five million brokerage accounts globally.

Market Data API supplies real-time quotes and six-plus years of historical pricing for US equities and cryptocurrencies. It is available both as a standalone product and bundled with the trading and broker APIs.

Instant Tokenization Network (ITN) is Alpaca's real-world asset infrastructure, launched in 2025. It allows platforms to issue tokenized US stocks and ETFs backed one-to-one by securities held in Alpaca's self-clearing brokerage. Minting and redemption happen in real time via a single API call, with settlement available around the clock even outside regular market hours. ITN supports issuance on both Ethereum and Solana. Settlement is accepted in USD, USDC, USDT, BTC, and ETH. By end of 2025 Alpaca held over 94 percent market share in tokenized US stocks and ETFs, with more than $480 million in tokenized assets outstanding.

Crypto Wallets API enables deposit, withdrawal, and custody of cryptocurrency assets — including BTC, ETH, DOGE, ERC-20 tokens, and stablecoins — within Alpaca-managed accounts. Custody is handled through Fireblocks.

MCP Server is an AI-native interface launched in 2025 that allows large language models — including ChatGPT and Claude — to interact with Alpaca's trading infrastructure through natural language. Traders can instruct the system conversationally to execute trades, check positions, or retrieve market data.

Solana Integration

Alpaca's connection to Solana runs through two channels.

In October 2025, Alpaca joined the Global Dollar Network and began offering USDG — the Global Dollar stablecoin — to customers on Solana. The company described this as its first production release supporting deposits and withdrawals for tokens outside of Ethereum, representing a meaningful step in connecting regulated US brokerage infrastructure with blockchain-native Solana liquidity.

The Instant Tokenization Network supports Solana as a destination chain for tokenized US equities. Platforms that want to issue tokenized stocks accessible on Solana-based DeFi protocols or wallets can use Alpaca's ITN as the regulated bridge: Alpaca holds the underlying securities in its clearing account while the corresponding tokens circulate on-chain. This positions Alpaca as backend infrastructure for any project seeking to bring US equities onto Solana with full regulatory backing.

Security and Compliance

Alpaca Securities LLC is regulated by FINRA and is a member of SIPC. The company holds memberships in Nasdaq, the Options Clearing Corporation (OCC), and FICC. Its security certifications include ISO 27001:2022, SOC 2 Type II, and GDPR compliance. Customer brokerage assets are subject to SIPC protection up to applicable limits. Crypto assets are not FDIC or SIPC insured.

Team and Investors

CEO Yoshi Yokokawa and CPO Hitoshi Harada co-founded Alpaca. The broader team draws from FINRA, Apple, Wealthfront, Robinhood, JP Morgan, and Lehman Brothers. Angel investors include former executives from eTrade, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Square, as well as founders from Plaid. Institutional backers include Y Combinator, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Portage Ventures, Tencent, and Peak XV. The company raised a $52 million Series C in April 2025 — bringing cumulative funding to approximately $170 million — and followed that with a $135 million round led by Peak XV in July 2026, earmarked for scaling agent-first brokerage infrastructure for tokenized markets and AI-native financial services.

Business Scale and Trajectory

Alpaca reached an estimated $100 million in annualized revenue by September 2025, up from $60 million at year-end 2024. Annualized trading volume reached $180 billion in 2024, representing roughly 3x year-over-year growth. In 2025 the company acquired WealthKernel to establish a UK and EU presence, completed EEA regulatory passporting across 29 countries by mid-2026, and received industry recognition including FinTech of the Year and CB Insights Top 100 Most Promising Fintech designations. Notable partnerships include Kraken (giving Kraken users access to US stocks and ETFs) and Backed (for xStocks tokenized asset issuance).

Ecosystem Fit

Alpaca sits at the intersection of traditional finance and Solana's on-chain economy. Through its Instant Tokenization Network and USDG integration, it functions as regulated infrastructure for bringing US equities and dollar-denominated liquidity onto Solana — providing a compliant on-ramp for DeFi protocols, Solana-native wallets, and tokenized asset platforms that want exposure to real-world assets without building their own broker-dealer relationships.