Alpaca Markets
Headquarters
San Mateo, CAFounded
2015CEO / Founder
Yoshi YokokawaEmployees
51-200Funding
Series B — $121.5MProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
8.1/10Website
alpaca.markets/
Profile updated
About Alpaca Markets
Alpaca Markets is a financial technology company headquartered in San Mateo, California, founded in 2015 by Yoshi Yokokawa and Hitoshi Harada. The company operates a commission-free brokerage and API platform designed for developers, algorithmic traders, and fintech businesses seeking to build or automate trading workflows.
Alpaca's core product is a REST and WebSocket API that provides access to U.S. equities and cryptocurrency markets, enabling programmatic order execution, account management, and market data retrieval. The platform is used by individual algorithmic traders, robo-advisor startups, and fintech applications that embed brokerage functionality. Alpaca is a FINRA-registered broker-dealer and SIPC member, and it offers both a retail-facing trading account and a business API product for third-party app developers.
Alpaca raised a $50 million Series B round in 2021, bringing its total funding to approximately $121.5 million from investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, and Tribe Capital. The company has expanded its product offerings over time to include crypto trading, options trading, and a broker-dealer API that allows other companies to offer brokerage services under their own brand.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Alpaca Markets
All products by Alpaca Markets reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Alpaca Markets
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Alpaca Markets's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.5 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Alpaca Markets competes with, and how they differ.
A far larger, publicly traded (NASDAQ: IBKR) broker-dealer with its own retail platform and API layer that competes directly with Alpaca for API-driven and institutional trading volume — Alpaca's own CEO named IBKR its "key competitor" when announcing the January 2026 Series D.
A similarly-structured brokerage-as-a-service provider offering white-label fractional-share trading APIs to fintechs and neobrokers, competing for the same B2B embedded-investing customer base, though it has focused more on emerging-market retail neobroker partnerships than Alpaca's crypto and tokenization push.
Company Timeline
Key milestones in Alpaca Markets's history, with sources.
- Partnership
Partners with Kalshi to distribute prediction markets
The deal lets Alpaca's 300+ financial-institution clients and roughly 14 million brokerage accounts access Kalshi's CFTC-regulated event contracts through Alpaca's existing brokerage infrastructure, subject to per-market regulatory approval.
financemagnates.com - Funding
$435M financing package: $135M equity led by Peak XV Partners plus $300M debt facility
The debt portion came from Kraken parent Payward and Canadian bank BMO; the equity round also included Elefund, Unbound and Opera Tech Ventures, earmarked for agent-first and API-first prime brokerage infrastructure.
financemagnates.com - Launch
Launches Alpaca Europe and European equities trading
WealthKernel was rebranded as Alpaca Europe and activated trading on Germany's Xetra exchange, with Euronext and the London Stock Exchange planned to follow.
financemagnates.com - Funding
$150M Series D at $1.15B valuation, led by Drive Capital
The round, which included Citadel Securities, Kraken and BNP Paribas's venture arm plus a $40M credit line, gave Alpaca unicorn status; CEO Yoshi Yokokawa named Interactive Brokers as its key competitor.
fortune.com - Acquisition
Acquires Zincmoney IFSC to enter India's GIFT City broker-dealer market
The deal gives Alpaca an IFSCA-licensed broker-dealer and payment service provider in Gujarat's GIFT City, with Zincmoney's Mayuresh Kini becoming CEO of Alpaca India pending regulatory approval.
financemagnates.com - Acquisition
Acquires WealthKernel to enter the UK and EU markets
The London-based regulated investment infrastructure firm gave Alpaca a direct European foothold ahead of its 2026 European equities launch.
itespresso.fr - Funding
$52M Series C funding round
The round, backed by Derayah Financial, 850 Management, National Investments Company Kuwait, Unbound and Portage Ventures, brought total funding to $170M and coincided with Alpaca becoming a self-clearing, DTCC-member broker-dealer.
techcrunch.com - Funding
$15M convertible note from SBI Group to fund Asian expansion
The Japanese financial group's strategic investment brought Alpaca's total funding to $120M since its 2015 founding, focused on growing Southeast Asian operations.
techcrunch.com - Acquisition
Acquires a Japanese broker-dealer to accelerate global expansion
The deal gave Alpaca a licensed entity in Japan to support its crypto and stock investing platform push into Asia.
news.google.com - Launch
Alpaca Securities LLC registers as a FINRA/SEC broker-dealer
The registration let Alpaca launch its commission-free stock trading API for developers and fintechs building on its brokerage infrastructure.
alpaca.markets - Founded
AlpacaDB Inc. founded by Yoshi Yokokawa and Hitoshi Harada
The company began as a database and machine-learning startup building MarketStore, an open-source financial time-series database, before pivoting to brokerage infrastructure APIs.
alpaca.markets
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