Catalyst, a startup building retail trading-focused agents, has raised $30 million in a seed round led by Sequoia.
The round also included Jump Trading, PeakXV, Lux Capital, AntiFund, Coinbase, and Premji Invest, according to the company. Catalyst says its agents convert natural language into trading strategy and then carry out that strategy, with a human in the loop required to accept the trade.
'People will simply state an intent, and we have our agents to figure out everything end to end,' said Iskandar.
Zheng said the company is trying to help users navigate what he described as an increasingly complex financial world. He said there has been 'this explosion of new financial assets in recent years,' while no player is 'actually helping to preserve and grow your capital.'
Sequoia partner George Robson said Catalyst's agents are 'a suit of armor as you navigate the financial world.' He said the goal is to 'move everybody up the curve in terms of sophistication,' helping traders explore a thesis, understand the instruments available to gain exposure, cost-optimize, and execute when the event happens.
Catalyst was cofounded in 2025 by Zheng and Iskandar. Zheng is 25 and Iskandar is 21. Zheng said he got into Ethereum in middle school, built a Village Global-backed biometrics startup in high school, and later joined Worldcoin in 2019. Iskandar published papers for the U.S. Department of Defense in high school.
The company says it has already run a pilot that generated hundreds of millions in trading volume over a couple of weeks. Catalyst says people are now being let off its waitlist and that the product is expected to be widely available in time.
The pitch lands in a market where retail investors are being handed more tools, more access, and more responsibility. That can widen opportunity when the rules are clear and the incentives are aligned. It can also amplify risk when speculation starts to look like entertainment.
Catalyst says it is 'not here to build a casino' or 'a gambling app,' and says it is building user education tools that explain safety and risk in a personalized way. Iskandar said, 'A farmer shouldn't need a hedge fund to be able to hedge.'
For capital, the attraction is obvious: software that promises scale, speed, and lower friction. The bigger question is whether automated trading tools can preserve discipline when markets get noisy. In finance, the market has already voted for convenience, but investors still pay for mistakes in cash, margins, and time.
