Catalyst

Catalyst is an AI agent platform for turning investment ideas expressed in natural language into trading strategies.^[2] Its interface combines financial research, visual workflows, signal monitoring, and trade execution.^[1] Catos Labs, Inc. operates the service at catalyst.app.^[3]

Overview

History and funding

Justin Zheng and Dylan Iskandar co-founded Catalyst in 2025. In its October 8, 2026 partnership announcement, Sequoia Capital described the company's aim as helping people translate an investment thesis into a strategy without manually coordinating the underlying trading venues and financial infrastructure.^[4][5]

Catalyst announced a $30 million seed round on October 8, 2026, led by Sequoia. Wilson Sonsini, which advised Catalyst on the financing, listed Jump Trading, PeakXV, Lux Capital, AntiFund, Coinbase, and Premji Invest as additional investors. The law firm's announcement said the company planned to extend the product to a broader retail audience.^[6]

Strategy creation and monitoring

The starting point is a natural-language description of an investment idea, event, or condition. Catalyst's agents research the idea and turn it into a visual workflow.^[2] The workflow connects incoming signals, conditions, and trading actions.^[1] Sequoia's product description includes identifying execution routes across platforms, backtesting a proposed strategy, and deploying it with limits and safety controls.^[4]

The homepage demonstrates conditional strategies that respond to news or social posts, alongside take-profit and stop-loss instructions. It also shows notifications for specified triggers, a quick-trade interface, and views for reviewing holdings, activity, and performance.^[1]

Research interface

The public website presents research widgets for the following information. Its displayed market data is labeled as an October 8, 2026 snapshot, rather than a live price feed.^[1]

Markets and capital routing

The FAQ lists spot tokens, perpetuals, tokenized stocks, and prediction markets as supported markets. Strategies can combine market data, news, social activity, and sentiment with trading actions across markets.^[2]

Catalyst Cash is the company's name for its internal capital-routing system. The FAQ describes a single deposit that the system routes to trading venues. It lists Apple Pay, credit cards, and crypto assets including USDC, SOL, ETH, and BNB as deposit methods. In October 2026, it described withdrawals in stablecoins and fiat withdrawals as forthcoming.^[2]

Authorization and execution controls

Catalyst's terms describe non-custodial wallets supplied through Privy. Users can delegate signing permissions to an agent, restricted by conditions such as transaction type, amount, recipient, or smart contract. Permissions can be revoked. Depending on the authorization, an agent can execute recurring transactions without requesting approval for each trade.^[3]

The FAQ says users set the budget, strategy, and execution conditions and can pause or change a strategy.^[2]

Risk and regulatory disclosures

The terms warn that agents can misinterpret instructions, produce inaccurate outputs, and cause losses, including loss of the entire investment. Executed transactions cannot be reversed by the company. The service does not guarantee execution timing or price.^[3]

Catos Labs states that it is not registered as an investment adviser with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or as a commodity trading advisor with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It says neither agency has approved the service.^[3]

Data handling

Catalyst's privacy policy, dated October 7, 2026, covers account identifiers, wallet addresses, prompts, agent outputs, transaction activity, and usage information. It identifies Privy as the wallet infrastructure provider and Alpaca Securities LLC as a brokerage partner for applicable securities features. Brokerage-account opening may require identity documents and facial verification.^[7]

The policy says user inputs are not used to train or improve its agents or underlying models. It also says outside model providers process data under its instructions and are contractually prohibited from using the data, inputs, or outputs to train their own models. The company identifies PostHog as an analytics provider.^[7]

References

1. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6Catalyst. "Catalyst: Intelligence at Your Fingertips." Product overview, workflow demonstrations, and research widgets. Accessed October 16, 2026.
2. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7Catalyst. "Frequently asked questions." Supported markets, capital routing, preview pricing, and execution controls. Accessed October 16, 2026.
3. ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5Catos Labs, Inc. "Terms of Service." Revised October 7, 2026. Sections 1 and 6. Accessed October 16, 2026.
4. ^1 ^2 ^3George Robson. "Partnering with Catalyst: Turning Ideas into Trades." Sequoia Capital, October 8, 2026.
5. ^1 ^2Sequoia Capital. "Catalyst." Company profile and founding year. Accessed October 16, 2026.
6. ^Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. "Wilson Sonsini Advises Catalyst on $30 Million Seed Funding." October 8, 2026.
7. ^1 ^2Catos Labs, Inc. "Privacy Policy." Updated October 7, 2026. Accessed October 16, 2026.