Alpaca Raises $150 Million and Valuation Surpasses $1 Billion

Good morning…

Our fund Social Leverage (fund 3) participated in this latest $150 million raise for Alpaca, now valued north of $1 billion. We first invested as a lead seed investor back in 2017.

From Alpaca…

Alpaca powers hundreds of brokerages and banks around the globe.

I like to call them the ‘Intel Inside’ of the ‘degenerate economy’.

In America today, the poster child for brokerage and ‘the degenerate economy’ is Robinhood (we were seed investors). It is well deserved. They originally launched the brokerage on APEX rails (infrastructure). In the early days of Robinhood growth, the APEX infrastructure was vital, but in most ways archaic. Robinhood eventually raised a lot of capital and built their own brokerage infrastructure. The rest is history.

When Yoshi pitched us on a modern APEX, we were all in. The timing felt right for Yoshi and his partner Hitoshi’s vision and skills. By 2017 I was convinced there would be hundreds of Robinhood’s around the globe. The world wanted access to US markets and stocks. We invested in one of these ourselves - GoTrade (fund 3)- which is growing fast and profitable in Indonesia. GoTrade is of course powered by Alpaca.

Today, Alpaca powers hundreds of brokerages (the next Robinhood’s) and banks around the globe including Japan, The UK, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, India and Indonesia.

I have learned so much attending the board meetings over the years as the company has grown - not without some very tough years. There is an incredible amount of detail needed to manage all the local financial regulations on a country by country basis. Alpaca is just as much a regtech company as a fintech company.

I predict much faster growth ahead as options, tokenization and maybe even prediction markets launch around the globe.