Sequoia Leads Catalyst's $30 Million Seed Round to Build AI Trading Agents for Everyday Investors

October 8: Sequoia Capital led a $30 million seed round for retail trading AI agent startup Catalyst, with participation from Jump Trading, PeakXV, Lux Capital, AntiFund, Coinbase, and Premji Invest. The company was founded in 2025 by 25-year-old Justin Zheng and 21-year-old Dylan Iskandar, both with notable backgrounds: Zheng previously joined Sam Altman's Worldcoin, and Iskandar published a cybersecurity paper for the U.S. Department of Defense while in high school. Its core goal is to enable ordinary people to navigate an increasingly complex financial world.

Catalyst's agent can convert natural language into trading strategies and execute them, currently still requiring manual confirmation, with the ultimate vision being that users only express intent and the agent completes trades end-to-end.