SAN MATEO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Alpaca, a crypto and stock investing platform for businesses from startups to Fortune 500s, announced it has closed the acquisition of a Japanese licensed broker-dealer, AlpacaJapan Co.,Ltd. (“AlpacaJapan”). This acquisition is the first step of many in Alpaca’s global strategy, expanding Alpaca’s global reach and opening access to investing for people around the world.
“Expanding into Japan presents obvious opportunities and advantages. Japan is the third largest economy in the world with the second largest household asset size, and is experiencing a recent acceleration and surge in money digitization adoption,” said Yoshi Yokokawa, Co-Founder and CEO of Alpaca. “Together with the AlpacaJapan team, we’re excited to accelerate opening financial services to the people in Japan through our battle-tested embedded investing product, and are looking forward to working closely with Japanese businesses and businesses entering into the Japanese market.”
“We’re excited to join Alpaca and begin offering Broker API and Trading API to Independent Financial Advisors, various types of trader and developer communities, and individual investors in Japan,” said Morifumi Yotsumoto, CEO of AlpacaJapan. “We’ve already begun collaborations with Alpaca and are preparing for a joint release of a new US stock product for Japanese investors. As a part of the globally distributed team at Alpaca, we will continue to strive to provide cutting-edge products to Japanese investors.”
Through this acquisition, nothing will change for current AlpacaJapan customers, and AlpacaJapan continues to operate as the FSA licensed broker-dealer in Japan. We will soon launch Alpaca Broker API which allows businesses and developers in Japan to launch stock investing products to their end customers, and stock trading API for algorithmic traders in Japan.
About AlpacaJapan
Co-founded by the CEO Yotsu, a financial services veteran from Barclays and Lehman Brothers, AlpacaJapan offers a Japanese stock infrastructure product for Independent Financial Advisor businesses, after obtaining approvals to be a Type 1 Financial Instruments Business, Investment Advisory, and Agency Business in August 2021. AlpacaJapan is preparing to launch a US stock infrastructure product later this year. To learn more about AlpacaJapan, please visit https://sec.alpaca.ai/.
About Alpaca
Alpaca is a developer-first embedded financial technologies platform that’s raised over $70m in funding. Alpaca offers crypto and stock trading, real-time market data, and end-to-end brokerage infrastructure through modern APIs. Alpaca is backed by top investors in the industry globally including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Social Leverage, Tribe Capital, Horizons Ventures, Eldridge, Positive Sum, Elefund, and Y Combinator. Securities are offered by Alpaca Securities LLC. Crypto services are offered by Alpaca Crypto LLC. To learn more about Alpaca, please visit https://alpaca.markets.