Paul Erlanger and Se Yong Park, co-founders of the consumer crypto trading app Fomo, took an unusual route to raising capital that is paying off for them. Their app launched in May and they just announced a seventeen million dollar Series A round led by Benchmark. This is an atypical crypto bet for the top-tier venture capital firm. The round brings their total funding to nineteen million dollars.
Instead of a classic seed round, the founders drew up a list of two hundred people they dreamed of having as angel investors. They knew that every single person would be valuable to the business. Then they worked their networks for warm introductions, as both had previously worked at the popular crypto trading platform dYdX. When that failed, they made cold calls. In the end, one hundred and forty of their dream angels wrote checks after hearing their pitch.
They landed such big names in the crypto world as Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron, co-founder of Solana Raj Gokal, and former Coinbase CTO and super-angel Balaji Srinivasan. There were a lot of people they never got to, like Elon Musk, but of the ones who did take their call, less than a handful said no.
The angels liked their idea of a super app that gives consumers access to every crypto asset ever, millions of them, available on any blockchain with no technical friction. The app also has a social component baked into it, where users can follow friends and leaders they respect to see their trades. While Fomo does not yet have every asset from every blockchain available, the founders said they are on track to be close to that goal in six months. Among the millions of assets they do offer today, users can trade everything from major coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana to meme coins and altcoins.
The ultimate vision is to one day allow consumers to trade all kinds of other assets on the app, from prediction markets to standard securities like bonds. A month after Fomo’s May launch, the founders added a feature that dramatically changed their company’s trajectory: support for Apple Pay. This essentially let users download the app and quickly start trading. They saw a massive influx of users and revenue. Fomo instantly soared to about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in revenue per week and three million dollars in volume a day.
The app collects transaction fees on each trade of zero point five zero percent, with a minimum fee of zero point ninety five dollars for transactions on Solana, and no minimum fee on other, less expensive blockchains like Base and BNB Chain. It does not make users pay so-called gas fees, or the fees blockchains charge to process transactions. That is a real selling point for users interested in holding the major coins.
Their many-angels strategy paid off because not one but three people reached out to Benchmark early-stage investor Chetan Puttagunta to offer an introduction. Puttagunta was a long-shot choice for a lead investor of the Series A round. Benchmark is selective with its picks and does not invest much in crypto startups. It backed Chainalysis in 2018, along with Toncoin and a few others. But Puttagunta saw Fomo’s fast growth and was convinced to take a chance, and a board seat. He said that Paul and Se and the entire team have a clear vision to make crypto assets both easy to discover and trade, and that their vision is clearly resonating with truly exceptional growth since they launched a few months ago.
Benchmark was the only institutional check the founders took, with the rest of the round going to existing angels and new ones. So far, it looks like Benchmark’s bet could pay off. Since the round closed in September, Fomo has added more assets from more blockchains to its app and has seen growth go even crazier. The founders say they have onboarded over one hundred and twenty thousand users. They are now doing about twenty to forty million dollars in volume a day, and about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in revenue a day.