Sequoia Leads $30M Seed for Catalyst's Retail-Trading Agents

Catalyst, founded in 2025 by 25-year-old CEO Justin Zheng and 21-year-old Dylan Iskandar, has raised a $30 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital to build AI trading agents for everyday retail investors, Fortune reports.

Co-investors on the round include Jump Trading, PeakXV, Lux Capital, AntiFund, Coinbase, and Premji Invest.

The product is a layer that converts plain-English instructions into executable trading strategies. "People will simply state an intent, and we have our agents to figure out everything end to end," Iskandar told the magazine. He framed the mission more plainly elsewhere: "A farmer shouldn't need a hedge fund to be able to hedge."

Zheng pushed back on the obvious critique: "We're not here to build a casino...We're building a lot of user education tools."

Catalyst's pilot generated "hundreds of millions in trading volume over a couple of weeks," according to the company, and it is now releasing users from a waitlist. Fortune does not report how many pilot users produced that volume, which brokerage handles execution, or how Catalyst monetizes.

Sequoia partner George Robson described the agents as "a suit of armor as you navigate the financial world." The round lands amid a steady run of agent-focused funding rounds we have been tracking this week.