Financial technology startup AlpacaDB Inc. today announced that it has raised $150 million in funding at a $1.15 billion valuation.

The Series D round was led by Drive Capital. It also drew contributions from more than a dozen other backers including the venture capital arms of BNP Paribas and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, two of the world’s largest banks. The raise brings Alpaca’s total outside funding to more than $340 million.

Providing brokerage accounts, accounts that enable investors to hold and trade in assets such as stocks, requires banks to build specialized software. They then have to secure regulatory approvals for that software and protect it from cyberattacks. San Mateo, California-based Alpaca offers a cloud platform that promises to ease the task.

The company provides the software building blocks necessary to launch brokerage accounts through an application programming interface. According to Alpaca, embedding the API into a financial application takes significantly less effort than creating everything from scratch. It also removes the need for developers to maintain the underlying infrastructure.

Several of the features in Alpaca’s API are designed to ease the management of cash reserves. The U.S. government insures depositories’ money up to a limit of $250,000 per each bank they use. With Alpaca’s API, a brokerage account provider can boost the coverage limit to $1 million by spreading client funds across multiple banks. The software maker also promises to help customers boost yields.

Investors with Alpaca-powered accounts can use their funds to purchase more than 11,000 stocks. The API enables banks to offer fractional shares, financial instruments that allow account holders to purchase a fraction of a share. Large investors, meanwhile, can be provided with debt for use in trading.

Alpaca supports not only traditional securities but also so-called tokenized stocks. A tokenized stock is a digital asset that derives its value from a company’s share price. Financial technology startups can use Alpaca’s API to issue tokenized stocks, process trades and perform related tasks.

The company also supports other financial instruments. It enables users to trade in more than 20 cryptocurrencies along with fixed-income assets, a term that encompasses securities such as U.S. Treasury bonds.

Alpaca provides financial institutions with data on their clients’ account activity via a so-called Server-Sent-Events connection. That’s a network connection through which an application distributes information to other systems in near real-time. Banks can use Alpaca’s data to power investment algorithms that automatically perform predefined actions in response to specific events.

The company disclosed on occasion of its funding round that its platform powers more than 9 million brokerage accounts. It will use the capital to establish a presence in more international markets, enhance its cybersecurity controls and build new trading features.

Image: Alpaca