Alpaca Raises $135M to Scale Brokerage Rails for Tokenized Equities

Alpaca has raised $135 million in new financing to expand the brokerage infrastructure it says is becoming critical to the next phase of tokenized capital markets. The company positioned the round not as a generic growth raise, but as a direct investment in the regulated rails that sit beneath tokenized equities: custody, order routing, brokerage accounts, settlement connections and the APIs that let fintechs and crypto-native platforms package those functions into end-user products. In practical terms, the funding is a bet that tokenized stocks will increasingly compete on market structure and distribution, not just on-chain wrappers.

The company’s own announcement says the round was led by Peak XV, with participation from Elefund, Opera Tech Ventures of BNP Paribas Group and Unbound, and that total financing now stands at $435 million including debt facilities tied largely to Kraken parent Payward and BMO. Alpaca also said the raise follows a separate $150 million Series D announced in January and comes after a period of rapid expansion across regulated entities and cross-border market access. Among the milestones it listed were acquisitions in India, the UK and continental Europe, a launch of global equities access beginning with European equities, and a sharp increase in monthly active API users as it built out tools for AI-driven financial applications.

The most relevant disclosure for RWA observers is Alpaca’s claim that it has surpassed $1.5 billion in assets under custody for the underlying stocks backing tokenized equities. Separate coverage of the financing said the company has previously cleared or held in custody roughly 94% of tokenized U.S. equities. Taken together, those figures suggest Alpaca is not merely adjacent to the tokenized-equity trade; it is trying to become one of the core brokerage utilities that multiple issuers and distributors rely on behind the scenes. That matters because many tokenized stock products still depend on traditional custodians, broker-dealers and transfer workflows even when the customer-facing instrument is issued and traded on-chain.

Alpaca’s product materials also make clear that this strategy is now embedded directly in its commercial offering. Its main platform markets an Instant Tokenization Network intended to let tokenized equities trade as one connected market with instant in-kind mint and redemption, while its Broker API advertises tokenization features built on real U.S. equities and fractional-share infrastructure. The company’s public-facing partner roster includes tokenization names such as Backed, Ondo and SBI Holdings, reinforcing the picture of Alpaca as shared infrastructure rather than a single branded issuance venue. That positioning is important in a market where distribution is fragmenting across wallets, centralized exchanges, regional brokerages and specialized RWA platforms.

The broader implication is that tokenized equities are entering a more operationally serious phase. Early launches proved there was demand for 24/7 access, programmable ownership records and globally distributed equity products. The harder problem is supporting those benefits with regulated stock inventory, compliant brokerage workflows, reliable mint and redemption mechanics and enough liquidity to keep prices anchored to the underlying shares. Infrastructure providers that can solve those bottlenecks may capture more value than consumer-facing apps alone, especially if issuers increasingly outsource brokerage and custody complexity rather than rebuilding it internally.

There is also a notable overlap here with the rise of AI-native finance. Alpaca’s announcement repeatedly ties tokenization to agentic software and API-driven investing products, arguing that programmable brokerage infrastructure will be needed both for on-chain assets and for automated financial applications that place, route and reconcile transactions at machine speed. Whether or not that framing proves as large as executives expect, it does reflect where product design is moving: tokenized assets are being treated less like standalone crypto instruments and more like inputs that can be embedded into global brokerage stacks, treasury operations and automated portfolio tools.

For the RWA sector, the financing is a reminder that the market’s next bottleneck is not awareness. It is production-grade infrastructure. Tokenized equities need more than issuance demand; they need regulated intermediaries that can support real inventory, manage corporate-action complexity, and connect traditional market plumbing to on-chain distribution without breaking compliance boundaries. Firms that can make that translation layer dependable are likely to shape how quickly tokenized public securities move from experimental access product to mainstream market format.

Alpaca’s raise does not settle the tokenized-equities thesis on its own, but it does show where sophisticated capital believes the leverage sits. Investors are backing the pipes: brokerage APIs, custody relationships, regulated entities and settlement interfaces that let tokenized securities scale across jurisdictions and user interfaces. If that thesis holds, the winners in on-chain equities may not only be the most visible issuers. They may also be the firms quietly operating the stock ledger, custody and execution stack beneath them.