Sequoia Leads $30 Million Seed for AI Trading Agent Startup Catalyst

Sequoia has led a $30 million seed round in Catalyst, a startup building AI trading agents for everyday investors, Fortune has exclusively learned. The round also drew Jump Trading, PeakXV, Lux Capital, AntiFund, Coinbase, and Premji Invest.

Catalyst's agents convert natural language into a trading strategy — and then execute it. A human in the loop must approve each action, but the ultimate goal, according to cofounder Dylan Iskandar, "is that people will simply state an intent, and we have our agents to figure out everything end to end."

Who is behind Catalyst?

The company's two founders met as teenagers over a poker game in 2019 at a conference run by economist Tyler Cowen. Justin Zheng, now 25, suspects Iskandar took his money that night. "We just stayed in touch, and we got closer over the years before deciding to start something together," Zheng said.

Both bring unusual résumés for their ages:

• Zheng got into Ethereum in middle school and built a Village Global-backed biometrics startup in high school before joining Sam Altman's Worldcoin in 2019.
• Iskandar, now 21, published cybersecurity papers for the U.S. Department of Defense while still in high school — his father had to chaperone him around military bases.

They cofounded Catalyst in 2025, circling one question: how to make an increasingly complex financial world navigable for everyone.

What does the technology actually do?

Catalyst's pitch rests on the explosion of new financial assets — from prediction markets to crypto — that Zheng argues has outstripped any single person's ability to process.

"There's been this explosion of new financial assets in recent years, but it's too complex for any single human to comprehend the optimal path," Zheng said. "Then, we have this arrival of superintelligence able to let us comprehend all of this. And there's no player here that's actually helping to preserve and grow your capital. We want to be the ones that can safeguard your cash and help you reach your goals."

Sequoia partner George Robson framed the product almost in superhero terms, describing Catalyst's agents as "a suit of armor as you navigate the financial world."

"The point of Catalyst is to move everybody up the curve in terms of sophistication, allowing traders to explore a thesis they have, understand the range of instruments they can set up to actually get exposure to that thesis, cost-optimize, and then execute exactly when that event happens," Robson told Fortune.

How much trading has the platform handled?

Catalyst has already run a pilot that the company says generated hundreds of millions in trading volume over a couple of weeks. The pilot focused on power traders, but the founders say the endgame is retail trading for everyone. Today, people are being let off Catalyst's waitlist, and the product is expected to become widely available over time.

Can AI-guided retail trading stay safe?

The backdrop cuts both ways. Retail investors have gained remarkable market power in recent years, yet the rise of prediction markets and the normalization of crypto make it easy to see how a platform like Catalyst could be misused as a gambling venue.

Zheng rejects that framing outright. "We're not here to build a casino," he said. "We're not here to build a gambling app. We're building a lot of user education tools that can explain the safety and risks in a way that makes sense and is very personalized to each user. Can we make investing safely just as fun as sports gambling? I think we can."

Iskandar cast the mission in even broader terms: "We want to build safe, trustworthy finance. A farmer shouldn't need a hedge fund to be able to hedge."

With Sequoia's backing, Jump Trading's market muscle, and Coinbase in the cap table, Catalyst now faces the harder test: proving that plain-language AI agents can scale from power traders to the mass market without becoming the casino its founders say they refuse to build.