A decisive signal just flashed across the financial infrastructure layer: Alpaca has closed a $150 million Series D round at a $1.15 billion valuation, led by Drive Capital, alongside a newly secured $40 million line of credit that meaningfully strengthens its balance sheet. This is not consumer-fintech spectacle and not an “app moment.” It is plumbing money, infrastructure money, the kind that usually appears when a market has already picked its preferred rails and is now preparing to scale them globally. Alpaca sits several abstraction layers below the end user, but that position is exactly why this raise matters: when the pipes get funded, the ecosystem above them tends to grow faster and with fewer points of friction. Partners ranging from Kraken to SBI Securities and regional fintech leaders across Asia and the Middle East already rely on Alpaca’s APIs and self-clearing custody to access stocks, ETFs, options, fixed income, and cash management products. That usage has translated into hard numbers rather than narrative momentum, with the company more than doubling year-over-year revenue while quietly supporting millions of brokerage accounts across more than forty countries.
What stands out is not only the size of the round, but the composition of the investor base and the strategic signal it sends. Drive Capital’s Chris Olsen joining the board places Alpaca squarely in the lineage of foundational fintech platforms rather than consumer-facing challengers, a comparison Olsen himself made by invoking Stripe and Plaid as historical analogues. The rest of the cap table reinforces that positioning: Citadel Securities, BNP Paribas’ Opera Tech Ventures, MUFG Innovation Partners, DRW Venture Capital, Kraken, Bank Muscat, Endeavor Catalyst, and Flat Capital, with Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski as controlling UBO and chairman, form a coalition that spans market making, global banking, crypto-native platforms, and regional financial institutions. This is less a speculative bet and more a consensus that brokerage infrastructure is becoming modular, API-driven, and globally portable in the same way payments and data access did over the last decade.
From a market-analyst perspective, Alpaca’s strategic emphasis on regulatory depth is just as important as its product expansion. Memberships in OCC and FICC, Nasdaq Exchange Member status, and the steady accumulation of local licenses in key jurisdictions are expensive, slow, and unglamorous steps, but they create barriers that are hard to replicate quickly. The company’s push into Shariah-compliant investing infrastructure, explicitly aligned with Saudi Vision 2030, is particularly telling. Rather than treating compliance as a surface-level feature, Alpaca is embedding it at the infrastructure level across savings, options, and instant funding, effectively enabling partners to serve Islamic-finance markets without rebuilding core brokerage logic from scratch. That kind of abstraction is exactly what global institutions look for when entering new regions or launching new asset classes under tight regulatory and cultural constraints.
The product cadence over the past year reinforces the sense that Alpaca is transitioning from “fast-growing fintech” into “institutional backbone.” Multi-leg options, fully paid securities lending, fixed-income products, 24/5 U.S. stock trading, high-yield cash via sweep programs, and early efforts to bridge traditional and on-chain financial ecosystems all point in the same direction: broader balance-sheet relevance and deeper integration into how sophisticated trading and wealth platforms operate. When partners like Sarwa describe Alpaca as a “core pillar” of their expansion across global markets and MENA investors, it underscores how infrastructure choices made quietly in the background can determine which platforms scale smoothly and which stall under regulatory or operational strain.
Taken together, this Series D is less about celebrating a unicorn badge and more about marking a phase change. Alpaca is positioning itself as a default layer for global investing, one that absorbs regulatory complexity, asset diversity, and market access so its partners can focus on distribution, user experience, and localized strategy. That is rarely the loudest story in fintech, but historically it is the one that lasts.
