Paul Erlanger and Se Yong Park, co-founders of the consumer crypto trading app Fomothey took an unusual path to raising capital that is paying off for them.
Their app launched in May, and they just announced a $17 million Series A round led by Benchmark — an informal crypto bet for the top VC firm — bringing their total funding to $19 million.
Instead of a classic seed round, the founders put together a list of 200 people they dreamed of having as angel investors.
“We knew that each person would be valuable to us in the business,” Erlanger told TechCrunch.
They then worked on their networks for warm introductions – both had previously worked on the popular crypto trading platform dYdX. Otherwise, they made cold calls. And 140 of their dream angels wrote them checks after hearing their pitch.
They attracted such big names in the cryptocurrency world as Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron, Solana co-founder Raj Gokal, and former Coinbase CTO and super angel Balaji Srinivasan; said the founders.
“There are a lot of people we never reached, like Elon Musk,” Park said with a smile, but of those who responded to their call, less than a handful said no, he said.
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The angels liked their idea of a super app that gives consumers access to every crypto asset (millions of them), available on any blockchain, without, they promise, any technical friction. The app also has a social component built in, where users can follow friends and leaders they respect to see their transactions.
While Fomo doesn’t yet have all the benefits of every blockchain available, the founders said they’re on track to be close to that goal in six months. And among the millions of assets they offer today, users can trade everything from major coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana to meme coins and altcoins, they say.
The ultimate vision is to one day allow consumers to trade all kinds of other assets in the app, from futures markets to standard securities like bonds.
A month after Fomo launched in May, the founders added a feature that dramatically changed the course of their company: support for Apple Pay. This essentially allows users to download the app and start trading quickly.
“We’ve seen a huge influx of users and revenue,” Erlanger said. Fomo immediately skyrocketed to about $150,000 in revenue per week and $3 million in volume per day, the founders said.
The app collects transaction fees on each transaction of 0.50% (with a minimum fee of $0.95 for Solana transactions and no minimum fee on other, less expensive blockchains such as Base and BNB Chain). But it doesn’t force users to pay so-called “gas fees,” or the fees that blockchains charge for processing transactions. That’s a real selling point for users interested in holding the big coins, Park said.
Their multi-angel strategy paid off because not one but three people contacted Benchmark’s early-stage investor Chetan Puttagunta to introduce them, Puttagunta told TechCrunch.
Puttagunta was a longshot for a lead Series A investor that Erlanger and Park were actively pursuing. Benchmark is selective with its selections and does not invest heavily in crypto startups. He backed Chainalysis in 2018, along with Toncoin and a few others.
But Puttagunta (who backs companies like Elastic, Cursor, Manus and LangChain) saw Fomo’s rapid growth and was convinced to take a chance and a seat on the board.
“Paul and Se and the entire team have a clear vision to make crypto assets easy to discover and trade,” said Puttagunta. “Their vision is clearly resonating with really great growth since they launched a few months ago.”
The benchmark was the only institutional check done by the founders, 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 get even more insane. The founders say they have onboarded over 120,000 users. “We’re now doing about $20-40 million in volume a day and about $150,000 in revenue a day,” Erlanger said.
