Hitoshi Harada

Co-founder and Chief Product Officer

Hitoshi Harada is co-founder and chief product officer of Alpaca, which he founded in 2015 with chief executive Yoshi Yokokawa. The company provides brokerage infrastructure through APIs used by more than three hundred financial institutions in around forty countries. He studied computer science and financial engineering at Keio University, served as chief technology officer of Forcia between 2006 and 2011, contributed to the open-source database PostgreSQL, and later led core architecture design for big data and distributed systems at Pivotal in the United States. Alpaca began as a deep-learning product before pivoting to trading infrastructure, was accepted into Y Combinator's winter 2019 batch after four applications, and raised $150 million in January 2026 at a valuation above one billion dollars.