When you trade US stocks, who's building the "invisible plumbing" behind that transaction? Two Japanese founders in Silicon Valley just answered that question with a $1.15 billion valuation. Alpaca, a brokerage-infrastructure startup founded by Japanese entrepreneurs in California, has become what is reportedly the first US unicorn founded entirely by Japanese nationals. Here's how their API powers 9 million accounts at 300+ financial institutions across 40 countries, and why they're being called the "AWS of finance."

A First for Japanese Founders in Silicon Valley

On January 15, 2026, AlpacaDB, Inc. (known as Alpaca) announced a $150 million Series D round that pushed its valuation to $1.15 billion. The deal vaulted the company into unicorn territory and, according to Japan's Nikkei, made it the first US-based unicorn founded solely by Japanese entrepreneurs. Cumulative funding now exceeds $321 million.

The round was led by Drive Capital, a Midwestern US venture firm whose co-founder Chris Olsen has joined Alpaca's board. Other participants include Citadel Securities, one of the world's largest market makers, BNP Paribas' Opera Tech Ventures, MUFG Innovation Partners, crypto exchange Kraken, Flat Capital (founded by the creators of Klarna), and X&KSK, a fund started by former Japanese soccer star Keisuke Honda. Alpaca also secured a $40 million credit line.

The company was founded in California in 2015 by two Japanese engineers: Yoshi Yokokawa (CEO) and Hitoshi Harada (CTO and CPO).

What Alpaca Actually Does

Alpaca's product, in one line: brokerage-infrastructure APIs for financial institutions.

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a way for one piece of software to call on the functions of another. Alpaca's APIs allow any bank, fintech, or trading app to plug in, and instantly offer trading in US equities, ETFs, options, fixed income, and crypto, without having to build order routing, clearing, or custody systems from scratch.

Think of it this way: if you want to launch a stock-trading app tomorrow, you don't need a decade of financial-systems engineering. You integrate Alpaca's API, handle compliance with your regulators, and focus on the user experience. Everything underneath, execution, clearing, settlement, tax documents, fractional shares, runs on Alpaca's rails.

The company's customer list backs up the pitch. Japan's SBI Securities, the largest online broker in that country, uses Alpaca to route its users into US equities. US crypto exchange Kraken uses Alpaca to power its stock-trading expansion. European neobank Revolut, Kuwaiti investment platform Zad (with Shariah-compliant options), and roughly 300 other institutions across 40 countries run on the same infrastructure. Together, these partners support more than 9 million brokerage accounts globally.

The "AWS of Finance" Vision

Yokokawa and Harada talk about their mission in sweeping terms: "opening financial services to everyone on the planet." The industry shorthand for this ambition is the "AWS of finance."

The analogy is simple. Amazon Web Services turned server infrastructure into a utility. Netflix, Airbnb, and Uber don't run their own data centers; they rent AWS. The result: any entrepreneur with a laptop can launch a global service in weeks, not years.

Alpaca wants to do the same thing for brokerage. Instead of spending two years navigating FINRA registration, DTCC memberships, clearing partnerships, and regulatory reporting, any company can rent that stack by the API call. This is the logical endpoint of embedded finance, the movement to make financial services something you access inside apps you already use, not standalone destinations you have to visit.

The Fintech Unicorn Landscape: Plaid, Stripe, and Alpaca

Alpaca slots into a clear lineage of fintech-infrastructure unicorns, each owning a different layer:

Plaid owns the banking-data layer. Its APIs connect apps like Robinhood and Venmo to users' bank accounts. Peak valuation: $13.4 billion in 2021, trimmed to around $6.4 billion at a 2024 tender offer.

Stripe owns the payments layer. Its APIs process online payments for millions of businesses. Valuation: roughly $70 billion in 2024, making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world. Founded by two Irish brothers in the US.

Alpaca owns the brokerage layer, the actual buying and selling of securities. Where Plaid moves data and Stripe moves money, Alpaca moves assets.

Alpaca has also pushed into a frontier the other two haven't touched. In October 2025, it launched the Instant Tokenization Network (ITN), infrastructure for issuing and redeeming tokenized versions of US stocks and ETFs on the Solana blockchain, 24/7. By the end of 2025, custody balances for Alpaca's tokenization business exceeded $480 million, reportedly a 94% share of the global market for tokenized US equities. Partners on the launch include xStocks (Kraken), Ondo Finance, and Dinari.

Why America, Not Japan?

Here's the question that makes this story more than just another funding announcement: why did two Japanese founders build this in the US instead of their home country?

Yokokawa graduated from Keio University and led the securitized-products team for Lehman Brothers in Asia before becoming an entrepreneur. Alpaca is actually his third company. Interestingly, Alpaca didn't even start as a brokerage company, it launched in 2015 as a deep-learning startup applying AI to financial data. Harada has candidly described that original business as "a solution in search of a problem." The pivot came when they watched Robinhood's mobile-first trading boom take off, and realized that the real need was infrastructure to help others build the next Robinhood.

Several structural factors explain why the US, not Japan, was the right foundation:

Capital markets depth. US venture capital deploys hundreds of billions of dollars annually; Japan's VC market is roughly one-tenth that size. Writing $100+ million Series D checks, as Drive Capital just did, is nearly impossible to assemble purely from Japanese LPs. Alpaca raised over $320 million cumulatively, a number almost unattainable inside Japan's domestic VC ecosystem.

Regulatory runway. Alpaca holds US FINRA, SEC, and CFTC registrations, plus self-clearing privileges for options and US Treasuries, and membership in the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. The US regulatory environment is demanding, but the pathways for a fintech to achieve these milestones are well-documented and well-trodden. In many markets, equivalent pathways simply don't exist.

Target market and language. A brokerage API selling into 40 countries has to be English-first. Building from Tokyo creates gravitational pull toward the Japanese domestic market, a well-served but much smaller opportunity.

Talent pool. Silicon Valley has decades of compounded expertise in fintech, compliance, and blockchain. During the pandemic, Alpaca actually closed its Silicon Valley office and went fully remote, but its early foundation was built on that talent base.

Japan's startup ecosystem is aware of this dynamic. The government's "Five-Year Startup Plan," announced in late 2022, targets 100 unicorns by fiscal 2027. According to CB Insights, Japan currently has roughly 9 unicorns, versus about 700 in the US and 170 in China. Alpaca's story is simultaneously a source of frustration (another company that could have been Japanese, built elsewhere) and hope (proof that Japanese founders can reach the top tier of global tech).

What's Next: Global Licensing Expansion

The Series D capital will fund three priorities: DeFi-related products, institutional-grade trading features, and, most notably, obtaining brokerage licenses in more jurisdictions. Alpaca already holds or is pursuing registrations in the US, Japan, UK, EU, India, and the Bahamas, with active regulatory dialogues in Singapore, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines.

The Middle East push is particularly strategic. Alpaca is cited in discussions around Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, the country's push to build a tech-driven economy, and powers Shariah-compliant trading platforms like Zad in Kuwait. These are regions where fintech is growing fast but localized brokerage infrastructure is often missing.

The Bigger Shift: From Consumer Apps to Plumbing

Alpaca's rise reflects a broader shift in fintech: away from flashy B2C apps and toward B2B2C infrastructure. The companies that own the APIs powering other companies' apps are emerging as the durable power centers of digital finance.

For Japanese entrepreneurs, the lesson cuts in an interesting direction. You don't have to fit your ambitions into your home country's ecosystem. If the market is global and the infrastructure is global, you can build global, from wherever gives you the best odds. What matters is that the infrastructure keeps the lights on when millions of people tap "buy" on their phones. Whether the team behind it holds Japanese, American, or any other passports is, eventually, invisible.

That invisibility is the point.

Japan has been working hard to build its own startup ecosystem and create domestic unicorns, but many of the biggest successes by Japanese founders are happening overseas. In your country, is it more common for ambitious entrepreneurs to build at home, or to leave for bigger markets like the US? And if your country struggles to grow large startups domestically, what do you think is causing it? Tell us how you see it.

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