Alpaca raises $135M as brokerage infrastructure prepares for AI agents

Alpaca has raised $135M in equity and added a large debt facility as it tries to become the regulated brokerage infrastructure behind tokenised assets and financial AI agents.

What happened

Peak XV Partners led the equity financing, with major participation from Elefund. Opera Tech Ventures, the venture arm of BNP Paribas, and existing investor Unbound also participated.

Separately, Alpaca secured debt financing primarily from Payward, Kraken’s parent company, and BMO. Together, the equity and debt bring the broader financing package to $435M.

Alpaca provides APIs that let fintech companies, banks, brokerages and consumer platforms embed trading in stocks, options and crypto assets. The company says the new capital will support global expansion, tokenised markets and infrastructure for AI systems that can monitor portfolios and execute financial actions programmatically.

Alpaca reports nearly fourfold growth in monthly active API users and more than $1.5B in assets supporting tokenised equities. Those operating figures are company-reported.

Why it matters

The strategically important part of Alpaca’s business sits below the consumer interface. A company building a trading product still needs regulated execution, custody, account infrastructure, reporting and compliance. Alpaca packages those difficult components into APIs.

That layer becomes more important if AI agents begin making financial decisions. An agent cannot safely trade using only a language model; it needs clearly defined permissions, regulated market access, risk controls and auditable transaction records.

The bigger picture

Traditional securities, crypto assets and tokenised products are beginning to converge inside the same software stacks. Alpaca is betting that developers will prefer one infrastructure provider capable of supporting all three.

The opportunity comes with significant risk. Autonomous financial actions raise questions about suitability, accountability, fraud and market manipulation. Alpaca’s long-term advantage will depend on whether its compliance and control systems scale as quickly as the applications built on top of them.