Justin Zheng

Zheng got into Ethereum in middle school, and by high school he had built a Village Global-backed biometrics startup; he raised his first seed round at 16. Sequoia Capital also lists him as having won a Pioneer grant for biometrics and crypto synthesis and as having twice been the youngest IDEO CoLab fellow.⁠[1][2]

In 2019, Zheng joined Worldcoin, the project co-founded by Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry. That year he met Dylan Iskandar, when both were teenagers, over a poker game at a conference run by economist Tyler Cowen. Zheng recalled that the two stayed in touch and grew closer over the years before deciding to start something together.⁠[1][1][1]

In 2025, Zheng and Iskandar co-founded Catalyst, a startup building AI agents for retail trading; its app is operated by Catos Labs, Inc. The question the two set out to answer was how to make an increasingly complex financial world navigable for everyone. Catalyst’s agents turn a user’s natural-language ideas into a trading strategy and execute it, with the user required to accept each trade; the platform supports spot tokens, perpetuals, tokenized stocks, and prediction markets, is free during its research preview, and is non-custodial.⁠[1][1][3][1][4][4][4]

Zheng has argued that the explosion of new financial assets in recent years has made the optimal path too complex for any single person to comprehend, and that superintelligence capable of comprehending all of it has now arrived. He said Catalyst is not building a casino or a gambling app but user education tools that explain safety and risk in a personalized way, and that he hopes to make investing safely just as fun as sports gambling.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

In March 2026, Catalyst first made its plans public and opened a waitlist at the same time. The company initially tested its product with high-frequency traders before turning to a wider retail audience; the company says its pilot generated hundreds of millions of dollars in trading volume over a couple of weeks.⁠[5][5][1]

On October 8, 2026, Catalyst announced a $30 million seed round, about seven months after opening its waitlist. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Jump TradingJump TradingJump Trading is a proprietary trading firm headquartered in Chicago. It was founded in 1999 by two former Chicago Mercantile Exchange pit traders, built its business on algorithmic and high-frequency trading, and trades equities, options, credit, commodities, futures, and digital assets. Since 2021 its crypto business has operated under the Jump Crypto brand and has worked on blockchain infrastructure projects including Wormhole, Pyth, and Firedancer; in December 2024 its subsidiary Tai Mo Shan settled with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over trading related to TerraUSD, paying about $123 million without admitting or denying the findings.Open the full entry, Peak XV PartnersPeak XV PartnersPeak XV Partners is a venture capital firm that grew out of Sequoia’s India and Southeast Asia business, investing across the seed, venture and growth stages in markets including India, Asia-Pacific and the United States. The firm began operating as Sequoia Capital India in 2006 and adopted its current name and became independent in 2023.Open the full entry, Lux CapitalLux CapitalLux Capital is a U.S. venture capital firm founded in 2000 by Peter Hébert, Josh Wolfe and Robert Paull, with offices in New York and Silicon Valley. Focused on emerging science and technology, the firm backs companies in fields including life sciences, artificial intelligence, robotics, manufacturing, aerospace and defense through fund investments and by helping to found companies.Open the full entry, Anti FundAnti FundAnti Fund is an investment firm co-founded in 2021 by Jake Paul and Geoff Woo, investing from pre-seed and seed stages through growth-stage companies. The firm combines technical judgment with its founders’ experience in media and consumer brands, focusing on artificial intelligence, robotics, defense and related infrastructure.Open the full entry, CoinbaseCoinbaseCoinbase is a U.S. operator of crypto asset trading platforms, founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, whose listed parent is Coinbase Global, Inc.; it went public through a direct listing on Nasdaq (ticker COIN) in April 2021 and joined the S&P 500 in May 2025. It provides crypto trading, custody, staking, and stablecoin-related services, launched USDC with Circle, develops the Ethereum layer-2 network Base, and acquired the crypto options exchange Deribit in 2025; its venture investing operates as Coinbase Ventures.Open the full entry, and Premji InvestPremji InvestPremji Invest is an investment firm established by Azim Premji in 2006, operating across private and public markets in India and the United States, with investment returns primarily supporting the philanthropic work of the Azim Premji Foundation. Its investment areas include technology, financial services, consumer, healthcare and industrials.Open the full entry. At the time, Zheng was 25 and Iskandar 21, and Catalyst was letting people off its waitlist.⁠[1][1][5][5][1][1]

George RobsonGeorge RobsonGeorge Robson is a partner at Sequoia Capital focused on seed and early-stage investing, who has led or co-led financings in fintech and other companies including Pennylane, Zefir, nsave, Tola, Aspora, WithCoverage, and Catalyst. Before joining Sequoia, he worked at Morgan Stanley and Revolut.Open the full entry, the Sequoia Capital partner who led the investment, said Catalyst’s team includes founding engineers at Palantir, the first engineering hire at Scale AI, and tech leads from Citadel, Citadel SecuritiesCitadel SecuritiesCitadel Securities is an American market maker founded in Chicago in 2002 by Ken Griffin and partners and headquartered in Miami, providing liquidity to institutional and retail investors across a range of financial products. It is a separate company from Citadel, the hedge fund Griffin founded in 1990.Open the full entry, Hudson River TradingHudson River TradingHudson River Trading is a proprietary trading firm headquartered at 3 World Trade Center in New York. Through its broker-dealer HRT Financial LP it trades for its own account and makes markets in US equities, options and futures, and it also handles part of the customer order flow of the retail broker Robinhood.Open the full entry, and Jump Trading; he said the team’s aim is to build the universal orchestration layer for turning financial ideas into reality.⁠[2][2][2][6]

Catalyst: Official website: https://catalyst.app/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]