Alpaca

Alpaca builds the brokerage infrastructure behind a growing share of embedded investing. Through its APIs, developers, fintechs and financial institutions can offer commission-free, customisable trading in stocks, ETFs, options, fixed income and crypto without operating a broker-dealer themselves. The company describes itself as the standard for embedded finance and trading APIs; hundreds of financial institutions across more than 40 countries run on its platform, which has seen over 7 million brokerage accounts opened and some 61,000 active developers a month.

The company's offering spans self-clearing broker-dealer infrastructure, multi-jurisdiction regulatory compliance technology and a developer API platform. It serves customers in fintech, hedge funds, crypto exchanges, wealth management and securities trading. Alpaca has raised more than $320m in total funding, with investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital and Y Combinator.

Alpaca employs more than 230 professionals across a distributed team in the United States, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil and the United Kingdom. The firm states a mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet, and combines proprietary technology with compliant infrastructure.