Alpaca, the developer‑focused brokerage infrastructure firm, closed a $435M round, split between $135M in equity and $300M in debt. The capital will be used to launch prime brokerage services, positioning the company against the big banks that have dominated institutional plumbing. Alpaca’s API‑first platform already clears roughly 94% of US equities and ETFs, and underpins crypto tokenisation projects such as Kraken’s tokenised stock offerings.\n\nAI‑driven trading has fueled a nearly 4x jump in API volume in Q1 2026, driven not by human traders but by autonomous agents.

Tools like the Trading MCP Server and a command‑line interface let AI and natural‑language systems execute trades programmatically. The equity portion builds on a prior $150M Series D that valued Alpaca at $1.15B; its cap table now includes Drive Capital, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Horizons Ventures, and Y Combinator.\n\nThe debt tranche is intended to provide the balance‑sheet strength needed for margin lending and securities lending, key components of prime brokerage. Alpaca remains focused on plumbing, not creating new crypto tokens, and its partnership with Kraken allows crypto‑native users to buy fractional shares of traditional equities on a single platform.