Alpaca, a fintech infrastructure company, has raised $135 million to expand its brokerage technology platform designed specifically for autonomous AI agents and tokenized financial assets. The funding round, led by Peak XV Partners with participation from Elefund and others, brings Alpaca's total financing package to $435 million when combined with debt financing from Payward (parent company of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken) and BMO.

What Is Agent-First Brokerage Infrastructure?

Alpaca's core innovation centers on what the company calls "agent-first" infrastructure, a technical foundation built to support autonomous AI systems in financial decision-making. Unlike traditional brokerage platforms designed for human traders, Alpaca's system allows AI agents to research markets, analyze portfolios, execute trades, and manage treasury functions through software interfaces while maintaining regulatory compliance.

This represents a significant shift in how financial technology is built. Rather than requiring each fintech company or bank to develop its own brokerage system from scratch, Alpaca provides standardized application programming interfaces (APIs), which are software bridges that let different systems communicate with each other. This approach dramatically reduces the complexity and cost of launching investment products.

How Does Alpaca's Platform Support Different Types of Financial Services?

• Traditional Securities Access: Alpaca enables companies to offer stock trading across U.S. and international markets, including European equities, without building separate trading infrastructure for each region.
• Tokenized Assets: The platform supports blockchain-based representations of stocks, bonds, and funds, allowing transactions to occur on digital networks while maintaining connections to underlying assets held in the conventional financial system.
• AI-Powered Applications: Autonomous agents can integrate directly with Alpaca's infrastructure to conduct market research, analyze investment opportunities, and execute approved trading strategies without human intervention.
• Prime Brokerage Services: Alpaca offers sophisticated financial institutions and trading firms access to trading, clearing, custody, and financing capabilities required by professional market participants.

The company currently serves fintechs, banks, broker-dealers, wealth managers, algorithmic trading firms, active traders, and cryptocurrency-native financial platforms across more than 40 countries.

Why Is This Funding Round Significant for the AI Finance Industry?

Alpaca's growth metrics reveal the accelerating demand for AI-native financial infrastructure. The company has doubled its revenue year over year for three consecutive years, and its monthly active API user count increased nearly fourfold during the six months preceding this funding announcement, driven largely by growing interest in agentic AI applications.

The company operates as a self-clearing broker-dealer, meaning it handles critical brokerage functions directly rather than relying entirely on external clearing firms. This regulatory status is essential for supporting AI agents, which require secure, compliant connections between autonomous systems and actual trading venues. Alpaca currently supports more than 10 million brokerage accounts across hundreds of financial technology companies and institutions.

Alpaca's expansion into tokenized assets has also gained traction. The company has surpassed $1.5 billion in assets under custody for underlying stocks used to support tokenized equities, connecting blockchain-based representations with securities held in the traditional financial system.

What Is Alpaca's International Strategy?

Beyond the U.S. market, Alpaca has aggressively expanded its regulatory footprint to serve global financial institutions. The company acquired an International Financial Services Centres Authority-regulated broker-dealer and payment service provider in GIFT City, an international financial services center in India designed to support cross-border banking and capital markets activity.

Alpaca also acquired regulated businesses in the United Kingdom and Europe, subsequently completing passporting across all 30 countries in the European Economic Area. This regulatory infrastructure enables the company to provide certain regulated services throughout the region under its European authorization, reducing barriers for fintech companies seeking to launch investment products across multiple markets.

The company has begun expanding beyond U.S. securities by launching access to global equities, starting with European stock trading. This reflects increasing demand from fintech businesses that want to provide customers with access to securities across different countries through a single infrastructure provider, rather than developing those products independently with separate licensing, clearing relationships, and compliance systems.

How Will Alpaca Use the New Funding?

Alpaca plans to invest the $135 million in product development, regulatory capabilities, international operations, and technology infrastructure required to support increasing transaction and account volumes. The company's strategy is based on the view that global markets are becoming increasingly connected, programmable, and accessible through software interfaces.

The financing reflects investor confidence in Alpaca's execution and the broader market opportunity. As tokenization reshapes access to global capital markets and AI accelerates the creation of new financial applications, Alpaca aims to position itself as the central infrastructure layer connecting those innovations with traditional and blockchain-based capital markets.