When Alpaca CEO Yoshi Yokokawa talks about AI agents trading stocks, he’s not pitching some distant future. He’s describing what’s already happening on his platform right now.

Monthly active API users on Alpaca’s trading infrastructure have grown nearly 4x over the past six months.

The numbers behind the agent boom

The acceleration started becoming visible in Q1 2026, when Alpaca’s API usage surged nearly 4x quarter-over-quarter. Monthly growth rates jumped from single digits in Q4 2025 to approximately 30% in early 2026.

The catalyst? AI agents. Alpaca has been building the tools to make this possible. The company launched and enhanced several AI-native products, including a Trading MCP Server, a command-line interface, and an open-source Skills Library.

The platform now powers hundreds of clients across more than 40 countries, supporting over 10 million brokerage accounts. Alpaca manages tokenized equities totaling $1.5B in Assets Under Custody.

Fresh capital for an agent-first future

On July 16, 2026, Alpaca closed a $135 million equity raise led by Peak XV, bringing its total financing to $435 million. The round values the company at approximately $1.15B. This latest raise follows a $150 million Series D completed in January 2026. Revenue has doubled year-over-year for three consecutive years.

Yokokawa has framed APIs as the essential foundation for AI-enabled market engagement.

Where crypto and tokenization fit in

The company supports stock, ETF, options, and crypto trading through its APIs. Its push into tokenized equities, now at $1.5B in AUC, signals a belief that the future of market infrastructure won’t distinguish between a share of Apple and a tokenized version of the same thing sitting on a blockchain.