The Idea:
In October 2024, Paul Erlanger quit one of the best jobs in crypto. The NYU graduate had spent more than three years at dYdX, most recently as head of business development, after a stint in private credit at Deutsche Bank. Se Yong Park had worked alongside him at both.
From inside dYdX, the pair saw the problem up close. Crypto had world-class plumbing, but using it was miserable. Want a token on another chain? New wallet, bridge your funds, buy gas, hope nothing breaks. As Erlanger later put it, onchain trading was just impossible for ordinary people. Meanwhile, the traders everyone followed could flaunt their winners and hide their losses.
Erlanger and Park, joined by fellow dYdX alum Prashan Dharmasena, bet on a simple fix. One balance across every chain. No gas, no seed phrases, no bridges. And a feed where every trade shown was real, verified and tied to a name.
Trading that felt less like a terminal and more like scrolling a feed.
This was the beginning of Fomo.
The Execution:
- February 2025: Instead of a classic seed round, the founders drew up a list of 200 dream angels, worked their networks for warm intros, cold-called the rest, and got cheques from 140 of them. The result was a $2M pre-seed backed by names including Solana co-founder Raj Gokal and Balaji Srinivasan.
- May 6, 2025: After a 1,000-person beta, Fomo went live publicly with a goal of bringing the next 10 million users into crypto.
- June 2025: Fomo added Apple Pay, turning a first crypto purchase into a one-tap job.
- November 2025: Benchmark, which rarely touches crypto and last made a notable bet with Chainalysis in 2018, led a $17M Series A, with Chetan Puttagunta taking a board seat. It was the only institutional cheque in the round. Fomo had signed up 120,000 users in its first six months.
- April 29, 2026: Fomo launched a web app sharing one account and balance across iOS, Android and desktop.
- June 22, 2026: In the middle of a crypto down market, Index Ventures led a $75M Series B at a $550M valuation, with USV joining. By then, Fomo had passed 625,000 users and $4B in trading volume, with 68,000 people buying crypto for the first time via Apple Pay. The team was roughly 17 people.
- June 2026: The same month, Fomo rolled out perps on crypto, stocks, indices and commodities and briefly cracked the top five of the US App Store's Finance chart. US regulators had just cleared non-custodial apps like Fomo from registering as broker-dealers.
- July 2026: Fomo was pulling in around $1.39M a week in revenue, third among Solana protocols behind only Pump.fun.
- Today: Fomo's homepage claims 2.5 million traders, four times its Series B count, three months on.
The lesson?
Erlanger and Park didn't raise a seed round. They recruited an army. 140 hand-picked angels meant 140 early users, testers and door-openers before the public app shipped, and that network helped connect Fomo to Benchmark. Most founders treat the cap table as a bill to be paid. Fomo treated it as a launch strategy. Your first investors should also be your first distribution channel.