Published October 8, 2026
Every investment starts with an idea. Maybe the cost of your morning mocha has increased, you’ve read Brazil is having a dry season, and you expect coffee prices to keep rising. What do you do next? The answer depends entirely on how much you understand about financial products, and which ones you have access to.
If you’re Warren Buffett, you already know every instrument type and asset class. You know when to use leverage and how to construct a cost-optimized trade. And you know how to think about what should trigger it. Is it when the official crop estimate lands? Or when rainfall in Minas Gerais crosses a certain threshold?
But good luck setting all that up in your favorite online brokerage account. If you’re not Warren Buffett, you can either pay someone to manage the trade for you, or buy some shares in a coffee company and hope.
Now, you can use Catalyst. Describe your thesis in plain language, and Catalyst agents gather and analyze market signals, identify the best path across platforms and venues, and help you backtest and deploy strategies with clear limits and safety controls. You can begin with intent, rather than the plumbing of the market.
Co-founders Dylan Iskandar and Justin Zheng recognized that while retail investing has evolved from telephone to web to mobile, the increased access has done little to help users trade richer investment ideas with confidence. Agents today can code full apps and prove novel math theorems. Trading itself has become increasingly algorithmic. Yet for most people, finance remains largely manual and DIY.
The problem has persisted because the solution is so difficult. Dylan and Justin needed expertise in trading systems and backend infrastructure. But they also needed the ability to bridge investors’ comprehension gaps. For Catalyst to work, it had to bring its users along and make sure they understood their options and the implications. It needed to ask the right questions, give the right feedback, and build trust at every step.
This insanely talent-dense team of true outliers has the skills to do just that. Dylan was a globally recognized classical pianist at 4, did cybersecurity research for the U.S. Department of Defense throughout high school, and arrived at Stanford as a Jane Street scholar before leaving to build Catalyst. Justin, meanwhile, raised his first seed round at 16, won a Pioneer grant for biometrics and crypto synthesis, and was the youngest IDEO CoLab fellow—twice. They’re also surrounded by fellow high achievers, including founding engineers at Palantir, the first engineering hire at Scale AI, and tech leads from Citadel, Citadel Securities, Hudson River Trading, and Jump Trading. And they are deeply thoughtful not only about their product, but about the responsibility of breaking new ground in agent-driven finance.
It is our privilege to be their early partner and lead Catalyst’s seed round, and we know this is only the beginning. Already, users are calling the platform “unparalleled” and “a perfect experience.” As the finance world catches up, their ambition is nothing short of building the universal orchestration layer for turning financial ideas into reality.
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