Crypto brokerage infrastructure firm Alpaca raised $135 million to expand the rails used by exchanges and tokenization platforms to offer US stocks onchain.
Peak XV led Alpaca’s equity round with participation from Elefund, BNP Paribas’ Opera Tech Ventures and Unbound, according to an announcement Thursday. The raise follows a $150 million Series D in January that valued the company at $1.15 billion.
Debt financing, primarily from Kraken parent company Payward and BMO, brought the total package to $435 million.
Alpaca clears or holds about 94% of tokenized US stocks, including products associated with market leaders Binance, Ondo and Dinari. The company said it has more than $1.5 billion of underlying equity backing tokenized shares held through its infrastructure.
The funding underscores a key limitation facing tokenized stocks, where putting a stock on the chain does not remove the need for a regulated company to hold the underlying shares, process corporate transactions and connect blockchain transactions to traditional markets.
Its Instant Tokenization Network allows market participants to mint and redeem tokenized shares against underlying shares around the clock. The products often pair blockchain-based equity exposure with stablecoin funding or redemption, connecting stocks to crypto’s 24/7 settlement rails.
