Company Overview
About Alpaca
Alpaca is a developer-first brokerage infrastructure company founded in 2015 and headquartered in San Mateo, California. It operates as a fully self-clearing broker-dealer with DTCC, Nasdaq, OCC, and FICC memberships — enabling it to provide end-to-end brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, fixed income, and cryptocurrency without requiring partners to manage their own clearing relationships. Alpaca's Broker API allows fintech companies, neobrokerages, robo-advisors, and wealth management platforms to embed multi-asset trading into their applications with a single integration.
Business Model & Competitive Advantage
In April 2025, Alpaca raised a $52M Series C, bringing total funding to $170M. The company serves more than 5 million brokerage accounts across 200+ financial clients operating in 40 countries. In 2025, Alpaca achieved Nasdaq exchange membership, OCC membership for options clearing, and FICC membership for fixed income clearing — completing a full-stack self-clearing infrastructure that few independent API-first brokers have assembled. The company also launched 24/5 trading for its Broker API, enabling partners to offer extended-hours trading to global users accessing US markets.
Competitive Landscape 2025–2026
Alpaca differentiates from legacy prime brokers and clearing firms by providing a developer-native interface, instant account onboarding, flexible KYC workflows, and commission-free execution — all accessible via modern REST APIs. It also launched an official MCP (Model Context Protocol) server in 2025, enabling AI agents to trade stocks, ETFs, crypto, and options in plain English directly from LLM-based tools. Alpaca's self-clearing infrastructure positions it at the core of the API economy for financial services, supporting the next generation of broker-dealers, investment apps, and AI-powered trading platforms.
Key Differentiators
Market Leader
Alpaca is recognized as a market leader in the Financial Services sector, demonstrating strong industry presence and customer trust.
Frequently Asked Questions
Estimated Visibility Trend (Beta)
Simulated 8-week rolling score
Based on estimated brand signals. Historical tracking coming soon.
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