Dylan Iskandar

Dylan Iskandar is an American entrepreneur and researcher who is a co-founder of Catalyst, a startup building artificial-intelligence trading agents for retail investors. He co-founded Catalyst in 2025 with Justin Zheng, and the company raised a $30 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital in October 2026.^[2][5]

Education

Iskandar attended Stanford University as a Jane Street Scholar before leaving to build Catalyst.^[3]​^[5] After graduating from Mira Costa High School, he enrolled at Stanford with the support of a $50,000 STEM scholarship from Edison and a $40,000 Amazon Future Engineer scholarship awarded for his planned studies there.^[6]

During high school, Iskandar was Grand Prize Winner of Google Code-in 2019 and founded RGBsec, a United States high-school cybersecurity team that was ranked first nationally in 2020. He co-developed the GroceryBuddies iOS application with his brother Winston during the COVID-19 pandemic; the app later won the U.S. Congressional App Challenge and was exhibited at the U.S. Capitol. He also led Mathisi-fy, a nonprofit organization focused on technology education for underserved youth.^[6]​

Career

Catalyst

In 2025, Iskandar co-founded Catalyst with Justin Zheng, a startup that builds AI trading agents aimed at everyday retail investors.^[1] Biographical profiles state that he was a globally recognized classical pianist at age 4 and conducted cybersecurity research for the U.S. Department of Defense throughout high school.^[5]

​Catalyst's product converts plain-English instructions into executable trading strategies, so that a user describes a goal in ordinary language and the company's agents carry it out. Iskandar framed the concept by saying, "The idea is that people will simply state an intent, and we have our agents to figure out everything end to end."^[1] He described the company's broader mission as building "safe, trustworthy finance" and argued for widening access to sophisticated financial tools, stating, "A farmer shouldn't need a hedge fund to be able to hedge."^[1] The company has said its pilot generated "hundreds of millions in trading volume over a couple of weeks," a figure reported as a company claim; Fortune noted that it did not report how many pilot users produced that volume, which brokerage handled execution, or how Catalyst monetizes.^[4]​

On October 8, 2026, it was reported that Catalyst had raised a $30 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital.^[2] The round's co-investors were Jump Trading, PeakXV, Lux Capital, AntiFund, Coinbase, and Premji Invest.^[4]