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

BlockBeats news, October 8th: 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, though manual confirmation is still required; the ultimate vision is for users to simply express intent and have the agent complete trades end-to-end.