Sequoia leads a $30M seed for Catalyst, which builds AI agents that turn a stated goal into retail trades
Jump Trading, PeakXV, Lux Capital, Coinbase and Premji Invest joined the round; a pilot with power traders generated what the company says was hundreds of millions in trading volume over a couple of weeks.
Catalyst, a startup building AI agents for retail trading, has raised a $30 million seed round led by Sequoia, Fortune reported October 8, with Jump Trading, PeakXV, Lux Capital, AntiFund, Coinbase and Premji Invest also participating. No valuation was disclosed. Cofounders Justin Zheng, 25, who joined Worldcoin in 2019, and Dylan Iskandar, 21, started the company in 2025.
What the agents do
Catalyst's agents turn a natural-language goal into a trading strategy and then execute it; per Fortune, "a human in the loop has to accept" before execution. Iskandar's framing: "A farmer shouldn't need a hedge fund to be able to hedge." Sequoia partner George Robson called the agents "a suit of armor" for navigating financial markets, and Zheng said, "We're not here to build a casino." The company says a pilot focused on power traders generated hundreds of millions in trading volume over a couple of weeks. Users are being let in from a waitlist, with wider availability expected later.
Why it matters
Trading volume is an activity metric, not an outcome: it says the agents were used, not that users ended up better off. That's the same distinction any company has to draw about its own AI spend -- usage up is easy to show, value produced is harder. Catalyst's required human approval step is the right shape for an agent that moves money; the evidence worth waiting for is how its users' results compare with what they'd have done without it.