Alpaca, a financial tech company out of the U.S., just locked in $150 million in Series D funding, increasing its valuation to $1.15 billion.
That’s a big milestone and shows investors are bullish about Alpaca’s brokerage API business and its push to grow worldwide.
Drive Capital led the round, but some big names jumped in too: Citadel Securities, crypto exchange Kraken, and the venture arm of BNP Paribas all wrote cheques.
Alongside the equity, Alpaca also grabbed a $40 million credit line, giving it more room to move as it expands across the globe.
Drive Capital’s backing isn’t just about the money. Chris Olsen, a co-founder and partner at Drive, has joined Alpaca’s Board of Directors. That move pretty much shows Drive and Alpaca see eye to eye on the future.
Alpaca’s story started back in 2015 with founders Yoshi Yokokawa and Hitoshi Harada. They found their space by building developer-friendly brokerage APIs.
Their platform lets companies, everyone from fintech startups to big financial players, add trading for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, and fixed income products right into their own stuff.
With Alpaca’s APIs, businesses don’t have to deal with all the headaches of building a brokerage system from scratch.
“We want to open up financial services to everyone on the planet,” said Yoshi Yokokawa, Alpaca’s CEO and co-founder, when he announced the funding.
He pointed out that the company’s growth really comes from bigger shifts in the industry, where traditional finance and crypto are starting to look more and more alike.
Expansion and Strategic Growth
Alpaca is growing fast. Its technology already powers hundreds of partner organisations in over 40 countries, supporting millions of brokerage accounts for big institutions and fintech platforms.
You’ll find its partners everywhere, like digital brokerages, crypto exchanges, and anyone who wants to give their users access to trading through Alpaca’s back-end systems.
Now, with fresh funding, Alpaca’s pushing ahead on several fronts. They’re moving into new countries, setting up local teams, and locking down the licenses they need to operate.
They’re also building their product lineup, focusing on more advanced trading tools and improving their APIs so clients can trade a wider range of assets.
Cybersecurity and platform stability are front and center too, especially as more regulated financial players jump on board.
And Alpaca’s not stopping at just traditional finance or crypto, they want to connect both worlds, making it easy to move between regular financial products and tokenised assets.
This cash injection follows a standout year for Alpaca. The company’s annual recurring revenue shot past $100 million, showing just how much demand there is for the kind of financial infrastructure Alpaca provides, especially now, as finance and crypto keep overlapping.
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Broad Investor Support
Besides its lead and anchor investors, Alpaca’s Series D round pulled in a wide range of global backers:
- MUFG Innovation Partners
- Flat Capital (that’s Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski’s outfit)
- DRW Venture Capital
- Altered Capital from Australasia
- Bank Muscat in the Middle East
- Endeavor Catalyst
Some familiar names returned too: Portage, Horizons Ventures, Social Leverage, Unbound, Diagram, and Derayah Financial all came back for more.
This group is a real mix of strategic and financial players. It shows how Alpaca’s business speaks to all sorts of people: the old-school finance crowd, fintech innovators, investors chasing regional growth, and even people looking at crypto.
