Alpaca has raised $150 million in a Series D round, valuing the company at $1.15 billion and pushing it into unicorn territory. The round was led by Drive Capital, with its co-founder and partner Chris Olsen joining Alpaca’s board as part of the deal.

The investor list mixes venture capital, traditional finance, and trading infrastructure players. Participants include Spark Capital, Portage, Social Leverage, Ribbit Capital, Citadel Securities, MUFG Innovation Partners, and Opera Tech Ventures. Alongside the equity round, Alpaca also secured a $40 million credit facility to strengthen its balance sheet.

This is not a small, symbolic raise. It is a clear bet on Alpaca’s role as infrastructure, not just a product company.

What Alpaca actually builds

Alpaca provides API-driven brokerage infrastructure. In practice, this means other companies can use Alpaca to embed trading and investing into their own products.

Its platform supports stocks, options, and cryptocurrencies. Instead of building a full brokerage stack from scratch, a fintech can plug into Alpaca’s systems and focus on product, distribution, and user experience. Alpaca handles the heavy lifting around market access and core brokerage operations.

That positioning matters. Alpaca is not competing for retail users. It is selling picks and shovels to everyone else who wants to.

Over time, the company has expanded beyond simple trading APIs into a broader, full-stack brokerage offering. This includes more complex trading features and the operational depth needed to serve larger and more regulated clients.

Why investors are paying attention

This round reflects a broader pattern in fintech funding. Infrastructure is back in focus.

Building consumer brands in finance is expensive. Customer acquisition is brutal, margins are thin, and regulation slows everything down. Infrastructure platforms, by contrast, can grow by riding the success of many other companies at once. If ten fintechs succeed on your rails, you grow with all of them.

Alpaca’s model fits that logic neatly. Every new trading app, wealth platform, or embedded finance product is a potential customer. The more fragmented the market becomes, the more valuable shared infrastructure gets.

The new capital gives Alpaca room to expand internationally, deepen its regulatory footprint, and move further into serving institutional and enterprise clients. Those are slow, capital-intensive moves. This round buys time and credibility.

What founders can learn from this

For early-stage fintech teams, Alpaca’s story is a reminder that not all ambition has to point toward end users. There is real value in becoming the layer others depend on.

Infrastructure businesses are harder to explain and slower to start. They demand regulatory fluency, technical depth, and patience. But when they work, they become very hard to replace.

Key takeaways for fintech startups

Here are a few practical lessons worth keeping in mind:

• Infrastructure plays can attract large, conviction-led funding rounds.
  
  
• Serving other fintechs can be a powerful growth strategy.
  
  
• Regulatory and operational depth becomes a moat over time.
  
  
• A diverse investor base can support expansion across markets and segments.
  
  
• Becoming “boring but essential” can be a winning position.

If you are building a fintech and struggling to clarify your positioning or long-term strategy, that is exactly the kind of challenge we help founders with at Your Fintech Story. Sometimes the biggest shift is simply choosing which layer of the market you really want to own. Let us know.