About Alpaca

History & Founders

Alpaca is a technology company headquartered in Silicon Valley that builds a simple and modern API for stock and crypto trading. Our Brokerage services are provided by Alpaca Securities LLC, a member of FINRA/SIPC. We are a team of diverse background individuals with deep financial and technology expertise, backed by some of the top investors in the industry globally. We are proud to be supported by the love of enthusiastic community members on various platforms.

Alpaca’s globally distributed team consists of developers, traders, and brokerage business specialists, who collectively have decades of financial services and technology industry experience at organizations such as FINRA, Apple, Wealthfront, Robinhood, EMC, Cloudera, JP Morgan, and Lehman Brothers. Alpaca is co-founded and led by Yoshi Yokokawa (CEO) and Hitoshi Harada (CPO).

Our investors include a group of well-capitalized investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Elderidge, and Y Combinator as well as highly experienced industry angel investors such as Joshua S. Levine (former CTO/COO of ETRADE), Nate Rodland (former COO of Robinhood & GP of Elefund), Patrick O’Shaughnessy (“Invest Like the Best” podcast host & Partner of Positive Sum), Jacqueline Reses (former Executive Chairman of Square Financial Services), Asiff Hirjii (former President/COO of Coinbase), Aaron Levie (CEO of Box), and founders of leading Fintech companies including Plaid and Wealthsimple.

Vision

Allow 8+ billion people on the planet to access financial markets.

We are committed to providing a secure, reliable and compliant platform for anyone who wants to build their own trading strategies, asset management automation, trading and robo-advisor apps, new brokerage services, investment advisory services and investment products. We value having a variety of developers who create exciting and innovative projects with our API.

What Services Does Alpaca Europe Provide?

Alpaca Europe provides RTO and custody services for US equities under its CNMV-regulated subsidiary, Alpaca Europe A.V. SLU We currently support trading of whole and fractional shares for stocks and ETFs listed on US public exchanges. Support for additional products, such as US Equity Options, US Fixed Income, European Equities, and Tax Wrappers, is on our strategic roadmap.

Our European platform is designed primarily for B2B partnerships. We work directly with Referral Partners—such as neobanks, crypto platforms, and wealth apps, enabling them to embed investing features directly into their applications for their end customers.

To serve our partners and clients, we provide a secure Broker API, partner dashboards (Brokerdash), and a production-parity API sandbox environment. All platforms utilize a secure "Two-Ledger" architecture to ensure strict data segregation and compliance with GDPR privacy laws, ensuring client PII never crosses the border.