Alpaca has completed its acquisition of UK investment infrastructure firm WealthKernel and launched European equities trading this week, putting the US broker-dealer in direct competition with Berlin-based Upvest in the region's brokerage infrastructure market.
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WealthKernel, which holds UK and Spanish regulatory permissions and has built its business around tax-advantaged accounts like Individual Savings Accounts and Self-Invested Personal Pensions, will now trade as Alpaca Europe.
Alpaca Europe Takes Shape With Shanmugarajah at the Helm
Karan Shanmugarajah, WealthKernel's chief executive, has been named CEO of Alpaca Europe and will run the regional business. The rest of the WealthKernel team has joined Alpaca, bringing what Shanmugarajah described as "local regulatory expertise with global, API-driven infrastructure" into the combined company.
Founded in 2015, WealthKernel operates from London, Nottingham and Madrid, and sells an embedded investing stack to neobanks, wealth managers and trading apps that want to add investing products without building their own compliance and custody layers.
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Alpaca comes into Europe on the back of a busy 18 months. The New York-headquartered firm closed a $150 million Series D at a $1.15 billion valuation in January, added Nasdaq exchange membership last October and picked up options and Treasury clearing memberships earlier this year to cut out third-party intermediaries. The company says it now powers more than 10 million brokerage accounts across hundreds of fintechs and institutions in more than 40 countries.
Xetra Goes Live, Euronext and LSE to Follow
Separately from the acquisition , Alpaca flipped the switch on European equities trading. The first venue is Germany's Xetra exchange, with Euronext markets and the London Stock Exchange expected to follow. The company said partners can access multiple markets through a single API integration, while Alpaca handles execution, custody and settlement through unnamed global financial institutions.
The launch gives Alpaca's existing US clients a way to route cross-border flow without connecting to separate European brokers, and gives European fintechs and banks a path to US equities, options and fixed income through the same pipe.
Alpaca has pushed this cross-border angle before, most visibly when it launched a tokenisation platform for US stocks in October. The company claims a 94% share of tokenised US equities and ETFs referenced in that effort, though it has not disclosed the methodology behind the figure or the total market size being measured.
Yoshi Yokokawa, Alpaca's chief executive and co-founder, framed the European build-out as a complexity play. He said the combined setup is aimed at "reducing the complexity of cross-border investing" for institutions launching regulated products across multiple jurisdictions.
Competitive Push Into Upvest's Backyard
European brokerage infrastructure is not an empty market. The leader sits around 900 kilometers east of Alpaca Europe's London base. Berlin-based Upvest, founded in 2017, raised $125 million last month at a €640 million valuation in a round led by Sapphire Ventures and Tencent, with CEO Martin Kassing telling Bloomberg at the time that the firm was targeting more than €100 million in annualized revenue and profitability within 24 months. Upvest says it processed over 100 million orders in 2025, up from 20 million the year before.
Upvest's client list reads like a roll call of European retail finance, including Revolut, N26, bunq, Webull, Raisin, DKB and Santander's Openbank. In the past six months it has added IG Group, which went live with French equities trading on Upvest's rails in November, and CMC Markets, which will use Upvest to launch multi-currency cash equities trading in Germany this autumn.
Upvest also faces competition from US-based DriveWealth and Danish multi-asset broker Saxo Bank, both of which sell white-label trading stacks to banks and fintechs.
Alpaca's pitch differs from Upvest's on one important dimension. Where Upvest's core franchise is European retail investing plumbed into local tax wrappers, Alpaca is selling a two-sided bridge, with US self-clearing infrastructure on one side and newly acquired European licenses on the other.
Alpaca's chief technology officer, Juha Ristolainen, joined from Upvest last year after five years as its co-founder and CTO.
BNP Paribas Backing Signals Strategic Interest
The acquisition also closes with institutional backing from one of Europe's largest banks. BNP Paribas, through its venture arm Opera Tech Ventures, participated in Alpaca's January Series D, and Managing Director Vincent Baillin said the bank was "excited to support Alpaca's growing presence in Europe."
Alpaca has been expanding in other regions at the same time. It announced plans in January to acquire Zincmoney IFSC, a broker-dealer licensed in India's GIFT City special financial zone, subject to regulatory approval. The India move, combined with the WealthKernel closing and the European equities launch, gives the company live or pending regulated operations in the US, UK, EU and India inside a six-month window.
