Alpaca raises $135 million to build AI agent trading infrastructure across crypto and traditional markets

Alpaca Markets just closed a $135 million funding round led by Peak XV, and the thesis behind the check is pretty simple: the next wave of traders won’t be humans clicking buttons. They’ll be AI agents executing strategies across stocks, crypto, and tokenized assets through a single API.

The raise, which closed on July 16, 2026, is designed to accelerate Alpaca’s push into what the company calls “agent-first” brokerage infrastructure.

The numbers tell the story

Alpaca’s monthly active API users grew nearly 4x in the six months leading up to mid-2026, and the company attributes most of it to AI agents being plugged into its trading infrastructure.

The $135 million round follows an already substantial funding history. Alpaca raised $150 million in a Series D back in January 2026, which valued the company at $1.15 billion. Before that, a $52 million Series C landed in 2025.

CEO Yoshi Yokokawa has been clear about the company’s direction: AI integration isn’t a feature bolted onto an existing product. It’s the core accelerator driving platform growth and user engagement.

What Alpaca actually does

Alpaca operates as a developer-centric brokerage API, providing the backend rails that let other companies, developers, and AI agents access financial markets programmatically. The platform supports trading across stocks, options, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies, and enables trading of tokenized equities on Ethereum and Solana through a unified API.

To make its infrastructure more accessible to AI systems, Alpaca has launched several purpose-built tools. The Trading MCP Server allows AI agents to interact with markets using natural language, letting a large language model place trades by describing what it wants to do rather than writing raw API calls. The company also shipped a Trading CLI designed specifically for AI agent execution workflows.

Why this matters for crypto

Most crypto-native trading bots operate exclusively within DeFi or centralized exchange APIs. Alpaca’s approach lets an AI agent rebalance a portfolio that includes Apple stock, an S&P 500 ETF, Bitcoin, and a tokenized equity on Solana, all through one connection.

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