Alpaca, the developer-focused brokerage infrastructure company, has closed a $435 million funding round split between $135 million in equity and $300 million in debt. The capital is earmarked for a push into prime brokerage services, a move that would put the startup in direct competition with the institutional plumbing that Wall Street’s biggest banks have long dominated.
Alpaca’s API-first infrastructure already clears roughly 94% of US equities and ETFs, and it serves as the backbone for some of crypto’s most ambitious tokenization projects, including Kraken’s tokenized stock offerings.
The AI agent tailwind
Alpaca’s API trading volume jumped nearly 4x quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026. The driver wasn’t human traders clicking buttons faster. It was AI agents.
Alpaca has been rolling out tools like its Trading MCP Server and a command-line interface designed to let AI agents and natural language systems execute trades programmatically.
