Alpaca Becomes a Unicorn later than $150M Raise Led by Drive Capital
What Did Alpaca Raise—and What Does It Change?
Alpaca has raised $150 million in a Series D round led by Drive Capital, valuing the brokerage infrastructure firm at $1.15 billion. The financing also includes a $40 million line of credit, giving the company additional balance-sheet flexibility as it expands internationally and adds regulated market capabilities.
As part of the round, Drive Capital co-founder and partner Chris Olsen will join Alpaca’s board. The board addition reflects a tighter governance link between the company and a lead investor as Alpaca broadens its regulatory footprint and asset coverage.
, Alpaca does not compete for retail investors. Instead, it supplies API-driven access to U.S. stocks, ETFs, options, and fixed income to banks, fintechs, and institutional platforms that want to launch investing products without building broker-dealer and clearing operations themselves. That focus has pushed Alpaca into a diverse competitive set—one defined by market plumbing rather than consumer brand.
Investor Takeaway
Why Are Strategic Investors Crowding Into Brokerage Infrastructure?
The Series D drew a wide mix of banks, trading firms, and platforms, including Citadel Securities, Opera Tech Ventures (BNP Paribas’ venture arm), MUFG Innovation Partners, , Kraken, Flat Capital, Altered Capital, Bank Muscat, and Endeavor Catalyst. Several existing investors also added capital, among them Portage, Horizons Ventures, Social Leverage, Unbound, Diagram, and Saudi-based Derayah Financial.
The diversity of the cap table points to Alpaca’s role as a market intermediary rather than a single-product fintech. For banks and trading firms, infrastructure providers act as gateways into embedded investing, cross-asset distribution, and international client flows. For platforms and fintechs, they shorten time to market while shifting regulatory and clearing complexity off the front end.
This mirrors a pattern viewn in other parts of finance. Payments and data moved first, with infrastructure firms becoming embedded across many platforms. Brokerage is now following a similar path as regulation tightens and the cost of standing up full-stack operations rises.
How Did Alpaca Build Its Clearing and Custody Stack?
Alpaca’s roots lie in large-scale and machine-learning systems. That engineering background produced MarketStore, an open-source time-series database for financial data, before the company pivoted fully into brokerage rails.
Over time, Alpaca built self-clearing and custody capabilities, reducing reliance on third-party clearing brokers. Self-clearing gives the firm more control over risk management, margins, and product rollout, while tightening integration between execution, custody, and reporting.
The company has also expanded its regulatory standing. Alpaca holds memberships with the OCC and FICC and is a Nasdaq platform Member—credentials that place it closer to core market infrastructure than to a lightweight API layer. Those steps suggest a long view centered on durability and compliance rather than rapid consumer growth.
Where Is Growth Coming From?
Alpaca says it now partners with more than 300 organizations across over 40 countries, supporting millions of brokerage accounts. Revenue more than doubled year over year, according to the company, as demand rose from both fintech platforms and institutions viewking turnkey access to U.S. markets.
Geography has become a larger part of the story. Alpaca has highlighted work around Shariah-compliant investing and regional financial modernization efforts, including . In the Middle East, platforms such as Sarwa have used Alpaca’s APIs to add stocks, ETFs, bonds, and options, including global options trading, without building in-house brokerage stacks.
That international angle matters because remains a bottleneck for many non-U.S. platforms. Infrastructure providers that can package clearing, custody, and compliance into a single interface hold an advantage as cross-border investing grows.
Investor Takeaway
What Are the Risks From Here?
Infrastructure scale brings its own challenges. Self-clearing increases operational responsibility, while operating across jurisdictions requires sustained regulatory discipline. Cybersecurity, uptime, and settlement reliability carry higher stakes when dozens of platforms rely on a single provider.
Alpaca said proceeds from the round will support global investment infrastructure, broader asset coverage, local market presence, and links between traditional and on-chain finance. Execution will determine whether the firm can grow quietly while the platforms built on top of it compete for attention.
With a unicorn valuation and a roster of strategic backers, Alpaca now sits among a small group of companies reshaping brokerage from the inside out. The test ahead is familiar to market infrastructure leaders: stay invisible to end users, indispensable to partners, and steady as volumes rise.
