Paul Erlanger and Se Yong Park, co-founders of a consumer cryptocurrency trading app Fomothey have chosen an unusual option to raise capital that is profitable for them.
Their app launched in May, and they only announced a $17 million Series A round led by Benchmark – an unusual crypto bet for a top-tier VC firm – bringing their total funding to $19 million.
Instead of a classic seed round, the founders made a list of 200 people they dreamed of becoming business angels.
“We knew that each person would be valuable to us in the industry,” Erlanger told TechCrunch.
They then worked on warm introductions inside their networks – each had previously worked at the popular cryptocurrency trading platform dYdX. If that did not help, they made cold calls. And 140 angels from their dreams wrote checks after hearing their proposal.
They have landed 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 have never reached, like Elon Musk,” Park said with a smile, but of those that answered the phone, fewer than a handful said no.
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The angels liked the idea of a super app that provides consumers access to all crypto assets (hundreds of thousands of them) available on any blockchain, without, they say, any technical friction. The app also includes a social element where users can follow friends and leaders they respect to see their transactions.
While Fomo doesn’t yet have every asset available on every blockchain, the founders said they are on track to get closer to that goal inside six months. And among the hundreds of thousands of assets they currently offer, users can trade every thing from major coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, to meme coins and altcoins, they say.
The ultimate vision is to enable consumers to trade every kind of other assets on the app, from forecast markets to plain securities corresponding to bonds.
A month after Fomo’s May launch, the founders added a feature that dramatically modified their company’s trajectory: support for Apple Pay. Basically, this permits users to download the app and start trading quickly.
“We have seen a huge influx of users and revenue,” Erlanger said. The founders say Fomo immediately grew to about $150,000 in weekly revenue and $3 million per day.
The app charges 0.50% trading fees on each transaction (with a minimum fee of $0.95 for transactions on Solana and no minimum fee for other, cheaper blockchains corresponding to Base and BNB Chain). However, this does not result in users paying so-called “gas fees” or fees charged by blockchains for processing transactions. That’s a real advantage for users interested in holding mainstream coins, Park said.
Their multi-angel strategy paid off, as not one, but three people reached out to Benchmark early-stage investor Chetan Puttagunta to pitch him, Puttagunta told TechCrunch.
Puttagunta was the long-term selection for the lead investor in the Series A round that Erlanger and Park were actively pursuing. Benchmark is selective and does not invest much in cryptocurrency startups. In 2018, it supported Chainalytic, along with Toncoin and several others.
But Puttagunta (who has backed corporations corresponding to Elastic, Cursor, Manus and LangChain) saw Fomo’s rapid growth and was convinced to take a likelihood and take a seat on the board.
“Paul, Se and the entire team have a clear vision to make crypto assets easy to discover and trade,” Puttagunta said. “Their vision clearly reflects truly exceptional growth since their launch several months ago.”
Benchmark was the only institutional scrutiny the founders underwent, with the remainder of the round going to existing and recent angels.
So far, it looks like betting on Benchmark may repay. Since closing its round in September, Fomo has added more assets from more blockchains to its app and has seen growth grow to be much more frenetic. The founders say they have already welcomed over 120,000 users. “We’re currently doing $20-$40 million a day in sales and $150,000 a day in revenue,” Erlanger said.