Sequoia Leads $30 Million Seed Round for Retail Trading Agency Catalyst
Sequoia Capital has led a $30 million seed round for retail trading agency Catalyst, with follow-on investments from Jump Trading, PeakXV, Lux Capital, AntiFund, Coinbase, and Premji Invest.
The company was founded in 2025 by 25-year-old Justin Zheng and 21-year-old Dylan Iskandar. Zheng previously worked at Worldcoin, raised his first seed round at 16, received funding from Pioneer for biometrics and crypto synthesis, and became the youngest IDEO CoLab researcher twice. Iskandar was a classical piano player at age 4, conducted cybersecurity research for the U.S. Department of Defense in high school, and dropped out of Stanford after entering as a Jane Street scholar to start a business. The two met in 2019 at a conference roundtable hosted by economist Tyler Cowen.
The product translates natural language into trading strategies and executes them. Research, strategy, asset selection, and cost optimization are handled on the agency side, while the execution step still requires user confirmation. Iskandar told the media that users ultimately only express intent, and the agency completes the process end-to-end. He also stated that farmers should not have to seek hedge funds for hedging. In response to casino-related doubts, Zheng claimed that the company is not building a casino but rather an educational tool for users.
The company claims that its pilot has generated hundreds of millions in trading volume within weeks and is starting to release users from the waiting list. The public launch is set to begin in March 2026 with a waiting list, and the seed round is expected to close about seven months later. Early test subjects were high-frequency trading users, after which the focus will shift to a broader retail audience. The Sequoia article was written by George Robson and noted that the team includes founding engineers from Palantir, the first engineering employee from Scale AI, and technical leads from Citadel, Citadel Securities, Hudson River Trading, and Jump Trading.
The target market aims to move hedging, research, and execution from institutional terminals to verbal intent. The current product is at the confirmation gate, with the ultimate vision being that users do not write instructions but only state outcomes. Shareholders include venture capitalists, market makers, crypto exchanges, and long-term capital from India, with trading volume metrics coming from the company itself, not publicly available exchange data.
The buyers are the seed fund led by Sequoia and follow-on investors, while the sellers are the founding team’s equity. The event is driven by the agency moving from chat to order placement. Funds are directed into the product and the waiting list opens, not into the public secondary market. Beneficiaries are startups that receive execution from market-making and exchange shareholders, while traditional retail brokers relying on complex terminals for commissions and tools that only sell signals without executing are under pressure. If the trading volume expands from the pilot's hundreds of millions, friction will occur at the confirmation gate and brokerage channels.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Sequoia's bet on agency finance aligns with its strategy of investing in talent density. George Robson's partner article highlights the team as founding engineers from Palantir, the first engineering employee from Scale AI, along with technical leads from Citadel, Citadel Securities, Hudson River Trading, and Jump. The founders have early paths: Zheng raised seed funding at 16 and worked at Worldcoin, while Iskandar wrote cybersecurity for the Department of Defense in high school and dropped out of Stanford after entering as a Jane Street scholar. The waiting list will open in March 2026, with the $30 million seed round closing about seven months later.
Funds from Sequoia, Jump, Coinbase, PeakXV, Lux, AntiFund, and Premji Invest are all on the same table. Jump provides market-making and execution context, Coinbase offers crypto entry, and PeakXV and Premji bring long-term capital from India into retail agency. The motivation is to compress institutional research processes into a single intent, first testing with high-frequency users before expanding to retail. The company claims to have generated hundreds of millions in trading volume during a few weeks of pilot testing, with the confirmation gate still in place, indicating that the funds are buying execution rights, not automated order placement.
Similar companies include Robinhood, which brought options to mobile, and eToro, which socialized copy trading. The difference is that Catalyst does not first create a brokerage interface but instead focuses on translating intent into strategies at the agency level. The industry position is in the early stages of expansion: the product is not fully end-to-end, and transactions still require manual approval, but shareholders already span venture capital, market makers, and exchanges.
The essence is a transfer of pricing power. Retail investors previously handed over the pricing power of complex trades to brokerage terminals and hedge funds; if the agency can connect research, asset selection, and execution, pricing power shifts to the layer controlling the intent entry. The mechanism is that models make strategy texts cheaper, while the real costs become confirmation, routing, and execution. The seed round binds these three steps' shareholders together in advance.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- Intent is free, execution is charged.
- If the confirmation button is present, the responsibility does not lie with the model.
- Retail buys the entry, institutions sell the channel.