Analysis
Fomo, a consumer crypto trading app founded by former dYdX team members Paul Erlanger, Se Yong Park and Prashan Dharmasena, raised a $75 million Series B led by Index Ventures, with Union Square Ventures and existing investor Benchmark also participating, valuing the company at $550 million. Angel investors in the round include Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus, Discord CEO Humam Sakhnini and Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz.
The company's first-year numbers are what earned it this valuation: more than 625,000 users, over $4 billion in trading volume, 110 million social interactions on the platform, and more than 68,000 first-time crypto buyers onboarded through Apple Pay, representing $25 million in purchases. That's a genuinely fast ramp for a consumer fintech product founded barely a year ago.
“That's a genuinely fast ramp for a consumer fintech product founded barely a year ago.”
Fomo's pitch is a social layer on top of on-chain trading -- discover assets, follow other traders, share positions -- competing conceptually with Robinhood's social features and with crypto-native apps like Coinbase's retail product, but built crypto-first rather than as a bolt-on. The new funding will expand Fomo beyond crypto into equities, perpetuals and prediction markets, positioning it against the broader 'everything app' trend Robinhood and Webull are also chasing.
For consumer fintech investors, Fomo is a useful data point that retail appetite for on-chain trading, wrapped in a social product layer, hasn't cooled even as crypto prices themselves have been volatile this year -- the bet here is on engagement and product velocity, not a single asset class's price action. The risk is regulatory: expanding into prediction markets and perpetuals invites exactly the kind of CFTC and state-level scrutiny that has slowed down other crypto-adjacent consumer products.
