Sequoia-backed Catalyst raises $30 million to build AI trading agents for everyday investors

Justin Zheng is pretty sure Dylan Iskandar took his money the first time they met as teenagers, over a poker game in 2019 at a conference run by economist Tyler Cowen. 

“We just stayed in touch, and we got closer over the years before deciding to start something together,” he said. 

They were a natural fit: Today, Zheng is 25 and Iskandar is 21, but both already have prodigious backgrounds. In middle school, Zheng got into Ethereum and by high school he’d built a Village Global-backed biometrics startup, later joining Sam Altman’s Worldcoin in 2019. Meanwhile, Iskandar was a cybersecurity whiz kid, publishing papers for the U.S. Department of Defense in high school (his dad had to chaperone him around bases). Both quantitatively inclined, Zheng and Iskandar found themselves circling one question: How do you make an increasingly complex financial world navigable for everyone? The result was Catalyst, a startup building retail trading-focused agents they cofounded in 2025. 

“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,” said Zheng. “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 recently led Catalyst’s $30 million seed round, Fortune has exclusively learned. Other investors in the round included Jump Trading, PeakXV, Lux Capital, AntiFund, Coinbase, and Premji Invest. The idea is this: The startup’s agents morph natural language into trading strategy, and then execute........

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