Sequoia leads Catalyst's $30 million seed round of funding to build an AI trading agent for ordinary investors

Sequoia Capital led a $30 million seed round of financing for retail trading AI agency startup Catalyst on October 8. The investment also attracted participation from Jump Trading, PeakXV, Lux Capital, AntiFund, Coinbase and Premji Invest. Catalyst was co-founded in 2025 by 25-year-old Justin Zheng and 21-year-old Dylan Iskandar. Both founders have prominent backgrounds: Zheng participated in the Worldcoin project led by Sam Altman, and Iskandar wrote cybersecurity-related papers for the U.S. Department of Defense in high school. The company's core philosophy focuses on lowering the complex threshold of financial markets and making it easier for ordinary users to participate in trading activities. The AI agent system it developed can convert natural language instructions into specific trading strategies and execute them, but it still requires manual final confirmation. In the future, the company plans to realize that users can complete the entire process operation by simply expressing their transaction intentions, and ultimately achieve the vision of end-to-end automated transactions.