Alpaca is a developer-first brokerage infrastructure company providing APIs and a self-clearing custody platform that lets fintechs, banks and trading apps embed access to US stocks, options, crypto and fixed income for customers in 40+ countries. Often called the AWS of finance, it powers more than 300 financial institutions and millions of brokerage accounts globally.
Hitoshi Harada is the Co-Founder, CTO, and CPO of Alpaca Markets - the fintech unicorn building what he calls the 'Global Financial OS.' A Keio University-trained computer scientist who rewrote parts of PostgreSQL (Window Functions, PL/v8), Harada spent years building distributed databases at Greenplum before co-founding Alpaca in 2015 with Yoshi Yokokawa. The company, named after an alpaca they spotted on a Silicon Valley billionaire's estate, has grown to command 94% of the global tokenized US equities market, serve 300+ financial institutions across 40+ countries, and reach unicorn status at $1.15B valuation with a $150M Series D in January 2026.
Zoa Research is a New York-based AI research lab building cross-domain quantitative forecasting models that generalize across finance, science, and beyond. Founded by Greg Volynsky and Sam Damashek - a Harvard Law/CMU duo and a Jane Street algorithmic trading veteran - Zoa trains LLM-powered multi-agent systems to automate the model-build-test-improve cycle. The result: forecasting engines that outperform narrow models in event prediction, deployed both as proprietary trading capital and as a Forecast-as-a-Service API for researchers, traders, and scientific labs. Backed by Y Combinator (S24), Zoa is building the infrastructure layer for probabilistic reasoning at scale.