Paul Erlanger and Se Yong Park, co-founders of shopper crypto buying and selling app Fomo, took an uncommon path to elevating capital that’s paying off for them.
Their app launched in Could they usually simply introduced a $17 million Sequence A spherical led by Benchmark — an atypical crypto wager for the top-tier VC agency — bringing complete funding to $19 million.
As an alternative of a basic seed spherical, the founders drew up a listing of 200 individuals they dreamed of getting as angel buyers.
“We knew that each single individual could be useful to us within the enterprise,” Erlanger advised TechCrunch.
Then they labored their networks for heat intros— each had beforehand labored at the favored crypto buying and selling platform dYdX. Failing that, they made chilly calls. And 140 of their dream angels wrote checks after listening to their pitch.
They landed such large names within the crypto world as Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron; co-founder of Solana, Raj Gokal; and former Coinbase CTO and super-angel Balaji Srinivasan, the founders stated.
“There’s lots of people we by no means received to, like Elon Musk,” Park stated with a smile, however of those who did take their name, lower than a handful stated no, he stated.
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The angels preferred their concept of a brilliant app that offers shoppers entry to each crypto asset ever (hundreds of thousands of them), accessible on any blockchain, with, they promise, no technical friction. The app additionally has a social part baked into it, the place customers can observe buddies and leaders they respect to see their trades.
Whereas Fomo doesn’t but have each asset from each blockchain accessible, the founders stated they are on monitor to be near that objective in six months. And among the many hundreds of thousands of property they do provide right this moment, customers can commerce the whole lot from main cash like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana to meme cash and altcoins, they are saying.
The last word imaginative and prescient is to at some point permit shoppers to commerce all types of different property on the app, from prediction markets to normal securities like bonds.
A month after Fomo’s Could launch, the founders added a characteristic that dramatically modified their firm’s trajectory: assist for Apple Pay. This primarily let customers obtain the app and shortly begin buying and selling.
“We noticed an enormous inflow of customers and income,” Erlanger stated. Fomo immediately soared to about $150,000 in income per week and $3 million in quantity a day, the founders stated.
The app collects transaction charges on every commerce of 0.50% (with a minimal charge of $0.95 for transactions on Solana, and no minimal charge on different, less-expensive blockchains like Base and BNB Chain). However it doesn’t make customers pay so-called “fuel charges,” or the charges blockchains cost to course of transactions. That’s an actual promoting level for customers excited about holding the key cash, Park stated.
Their many-angels technique paid off as a result of not one however three individuals reached out to Benchmark early-stage investor Chetan Puttagunta to supply an introduction, Puttagunta advised TechCrunch.
Puttagunta was a long-shot alternative for a lead investor of the Sequence A spherical that Erlanger and Park had been actively pursuing. Benchmark is selective with its picks and doesn’t make investments a lot in crypto startups. It backed Chainalysis in 2018, together with Toncoin and some others.
However Puttagunta (who’s backed such corporations as Elastic, Cursor, Manus and LangChain) noticed Fomo’s quick development and was satisfied to take an opportunity, and a board seat.
“Paul and Se and your entire crew have a transparent imaginative and prescient to make crypto property each straightforward to find and commerce,” Puttagunta stated. “Their imaginative and prescient is clearly resonating with really distinctive development since they launched a number of months in the past.”
Benchmark was the one institutional verify the founders took, with the remainder of the spherical going to current angels and new ones.
Up to now, it appears like Benchmark’s wager may repay. Because the spherical closed in September, Fomo has added extra property from extra blockchains to its app and has seen development go even crazier. The founders say they’ve onboarded over 120,000 customers. “We’re now doing about $20-$40 million in quantity a day, and about $150,000 in income a day,” Erlanger stated.
