How Alpaca built the API brokerage for 300+ global fintechs across 45 Countries, with CEO Yoshi Yokokawa

How Alpaca built the API brokerage for 300+ global fintechs across 45 Countries, with CEO Yoshi Yokokawa

From The Fintech Blueprint by Lex Sokolin

March 5, 2026 · 47 min · Episode 198

About this episode

Lex Sokolin interviews Yoshi Yokokawa about Alpaca's API-based brokerage services and the evolution of fintech.

In this episode, Lex chats with Yoshi Yokokawa, CEO of Alpaca — a brokerage infrastructure company that provides API-based trading and custody services to fintechs and developers globally. The conversation begins with their shared experience at Lehman Brothers during the 2008 financial crisis, where Yoshi worked in fixed income securitization and learned that even when market participants sense a bubble, they keep dancing because timing the exit is impossible. After Lehman's collapse, Yoshi pursued entrepreneurship, building a computer vision AI company acquired by Kyocera before founding Alpaca in 2017. Initially inspired by Robinhood, Yoshi pivoted after experiencing firsthand the friction of accessing brokerage infrastructure—realizing the deeper opportunity was building API-first brokerage rails for developers. Today Alpaca powers 9 million accounts through 300+ partners across 45 countries, recently raising $150 million at a unicorn valuation. The discussion explores how Alpaca follows Robinhood's product roadmap to anticipate partner demand, the challenges of adding crypto, and Yoshi's thesis that finance is undergoing a generational shift from digital to on-chain…

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