The brokerage infrastructure startup, which powers tokenized equities for Kraken, is betting big on AI agents as the next wave of trading clients.
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.
The equity portion of the raise builds on Alpaca’s $150 million Series D completed in January 2026, which valued the company at $1.15 billion. Total equity funding now exceeds $320 million, with a cap table that includes Drive Capital, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Horizons Ventures, and Y Combinator.
The crypto bridge nobody’s talking about #
The clearest example of Alpaca’s crypto role is its partnership with Kraken. The exchange uses Alpaca’s technology to offer tokenized US equities and ETFs, meaning crypto-native users can buy fractional shares of traditional stocks through Kraken’s platform with Alpaca handling the clearing and settlement on the back end.
No new crypto tokens are associated with this funding round. The company’s value proposition remains firmly in the plumbing, not in launching speculative assets.
Prime brokerage ambitions #
Traditional prime brokers, think Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, provide institutional clients with securities lending, margin financing, trade execution, and custody services. The $300 million debt component of this raise likely serves as the balance sheet ammunition needed to offer margin and lending services, which are capital-intensive by nature.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our