0% read
Last updated:
Catalyst
Catalyst is an artificial-intelligence agent platform for researching financial markets and automating trading strategies, described by its creators as "the intent layer for all of finance."[1] The platform converts natural-language ideas into automated trading strategies, researching a user's thesis, building a workflow of conditions and trades, monitoring real-time signals, and executing actions, with a human required to approve the agent's actions before they run.[2]
Overview
Catalyst is built around the idea that an individual investor should be able to begin with an investment intent rather than having to manage the "plumbing" of financial markets.[3] The founders observed that while retail investing has evolved from telephone to web to mobile, that increased access has done little to help users trade richer investment ideas with confidence, and that trading has become increasingly algorithmic while most individual investors remain largely manual and do-it-yourself.[3] Cofounder Dylan Iskandar has framed the core concept as users who "will simply state an intent, and we have our agents to figure out everything end to end."[2]
A user describes an idea, thesis, or trade in plain English, and Catalyst identifies the relevant information, builds a visual workflow with trading conditions, monitors events that may trigger an action, and executes the resulting strategy.[4][1] The company has illustrated the breadth of inputs it aims to handle with examples such as noticing that data centers are "popping-up everywhere," believing that "gold will skyrocket," or simply knowing that "Labubus will go out of fashion," each treated as a belief that can be researched and translated into a trade.[5] According to the company, Catalyst "researches your ideas, builds the optimal strategy, monitors events, and executes trades. Autonomously."[5]
Strategies can draw on market data, news, social activity, sentiment, and other real-time signals, and users can combine multiple signals and trading actions across different markets within a single workflow.[1] The platform supports spot tokens, perpetual futures, tokenized stocks, and prediction markets, with the company stating that more onchain and offchain assets are planned.[1][4]
Products and Features
The platform combines a set of research and tracking widgets with an automation engine. The research surfaces cover prediction markets, where users follow market odds, trader activity, and positions across events; stocks, with company performance, earnings, and price history; options, including contracts, trading activity, and unusual options flow; and perpetuals, with prices, funding rates, and open interest.[1] Additional modules track market sentiment and trader positioning, surface social posts relevant to a user's research, follow money moving into and out of funds, and present a portfolio view of holdings, allocation, transactions, and performance, alongside a news feed of headlines and developments across markets and topics.[1]
A Quick trade feature lets users choose a market, set a size, and review a trade in a few clicks, while a Strategies view tracks holdings, reviews activity, and compares performance.[1] The company has also referenced a component called Catalyst Cash that handles capital routing between supported venues.[4]
Catalyst supports deposits through supported fiat payment methods, including Apple Pay and credit cards, as well as crypto assets such as USDC, SOL, ETH, and BNB.[1] Withdrawals are supported in stablecoins, with the company stating that fiat withdrawals are planned.[1] The company states that Catalyst is free during its research preview.[1]
Safety and Custody
Catalyst emphasizes a constrained execution model in contrast to connecting a large language model directly to a brokerage account. "We don't just connect an LLM to your brokerage account and let it trade freely," the company states, describing the platform as non-custodial with no access to user funds.[1] Agents execute transactions through non-custodial wallets provided by Privy, operating within the permissions and limits a user authorizes.[4] The company describes a custom execution framework with controls over how agents access data, build strategies, and place trades, states that every action is verifiable end-to-end, and says users set the budget, strategy, and execution conditions within which the agents must operate, with the ability to pause or modify strategies at any time.[1][4]
Founders and Team
Justin Zheng and Dylan Iskandar cofounded Catalyst in 2025; at the time of the October 2026 reporting Zheng was 25 and Iskandar was 21.[2] Zheng became involved in Ethereum in middle school, built a Village Global-backed biometrics startup by high school, and joined Sam Altman's Worldcoin in 2019.[2] Sequoia's account adds that he raised his first seed round at age 16, won a Pioneer grant for a synthesis of biometrics and crypto, and was the youngest IDEO CoLab fellow, twice.[3]
Sequoia described the broader team as "insanely talent-dense," listing founding engineers at Palantir, the first engineering hire at Scale AI, and technical leads drawn from Citadel, Citadel Securities, Hudson River Trading, and Jump Trading.[3]
Funding
In October 2026 Sequoia Capital led Catalyst's $30 million seed round.[2] Other investors named in the round were Jump Trading, PeakXV, Lux Capital, AntiFund, Coinbase, and Premji Invest.[2] Sequoia partner George Robson announced the firm's role as an early partner in an article published October 8, 2026, titled "Partnering with Catalyst: Turning Ideas into Trades," describing Catalyst's ambition as building the universal orchestration layer for turning financial ideas into reality.[3]
See something wrong?
