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.