Fomo Co-founder Se Yong Park Announces Completion of First Round Angel Financing with 140 Investors
Se Yong Park, co-founder of the crypto trading app Fomo, announced that the company's first round of financing has been completed, with 140 angel investors participating. The current equity structure shows that there are over 200 angel investors.
Fomo did not follow the traditional seed round path led by institutional investors, but instead listed about 200 target angels and made warm introductions through the network of former dYdX colleagues, reaching out cold if introductions failed. Ultimately, 140 investors signed checks after hearing the pitch, with the first round amounting to $2 million, completed before the product was publicly launched. The early investors include key operators in on-chain infrastructure and trading circles, such as Solana co-founder Raj Gokal, Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, LayerZero Labs CEO Bryan Pellegrino, Jito Labs CEO Lucas Bruder, Sei co-founder Jeffrey Feng, and Azuki founder Zagabond.
Park's financing philosophy is that early founders almost always misjudge the relationship between the company and angels, viewing angels as bullish options on product success rather than immediate advisors. Even if the shareholder list includes CEOs of tech companies, celebrities, or athletes, the probability that they will provide real help in the very early stages is close to zero; only when these individuals actually use the product and are willing to share it will word-of-mouth distribution be unlocked. He added that only about one percent of angels can truly contribute consistently.
The three co-founders, Paul Erlanger, Se Yong Park, and Prashan Dharmasena, all come from the decentralized exchange dYdX, with the first two having previously worked together at Deutsche Bank for about five years. The company is established as a Delaware entity, positioning its product as a non-custodial consumer trading application, allowing users to make their first purchase via Apple Pay without handling cross-chain bridging and on-chain gas fees. The angel structure from the first round later became a trigger for institutional entry: three angels actively recommended Benchmark early investor Chetan Puttagunta, leading to Benchmark leading a $17 million Series A round as the sole institutional investor, bringing total financing to about $19 million at that time.
After closing the Series A, the company continued to expand its chain and asset offerings. After the public launch, users exceeded 120,000 at one point, with daily trading volumes around $20 million to $40 million and daily revenue of about $150,000. Subsequently, Index Ventures led a $75 million Series B round, valuing the company at $550 million, with Union Square Ventures and Benchmark participating, and consumer internet founders like Mark Pincus, Humam Sakhnini, and Kevin Hartz joining the shareholder list, bringing total disclosed financing to about $94 million. The funds are intended for expanding the engineering team, broadening asset categories to include stocks, perpetual contracts, and prediction markets, and assessing acquisitions of smaller teams.
In terms of market mechanics, buyers include founders of on-chain infrastructure, traders, and consumer internet founders, while sellers are equity rather than tokens; this is equity financing driven by product cold start, not a secondary market event. Funds flow from personal checks to R&D and customer acquisition at the non-custodial trading front end, benefiting Fomo, which needs distribution nodes, and early angels who gain bullish options, while traditional terminals that still rely on wallets, gas, and cross-chain education face governance friction when negotiating with over 200 dispersed equity holders.
Supplementary data shows that before and after the Series B, the public figures were about 600,000 users, with cumulative transactions exceeding $4 billion, daily new users around 3,500, and a team of about 17; later interviews mentioned users reaching 1.3 million, with daily new users around 30,000. The platform remains non-custodial, emphasizing that it does not directly hold customer funds.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Se Yong Park and Paul Erlanger's path is not a parachute into consumer applications, but rather a departure from the trading infrastructure at Deutsche Bank to dYdX. After working together at dYdX for many years, they viewed the friction of needing to understand wallets, gas, bridges, and chains in professional derivatives terminals as a deadlock for the mass market, and brought in Prashan Dharmasena, who has a background in Square, OpenSea, and dYdX mobile, to work on the client side. The first round did not seek funds but instead looked for 140 people who could trade or issue tokens, directly converting the networks accumulated during the dYdX era into shareholders, rather than telling stories to institutions that do not use the product.
The order of capital mobilization is personal checks first, followed by institutional subscription network effects. The $2 million pre-seed locked in Raj Gokal, Marc Boiron, Balaji Srinivasan, Bryan Pellegrino, Lucas Bruder, and others into the equity table, effectively buying bullish options on the distribution interfaces of Solana, Polygon, cross-chain, and MEV layers; these individuals contributed little early on, but when all three called Benchmark's Chetan Puttagunta simultaneously, they completed the leap from network credibility to a top-tier fund. The Series A saw Benchmark making a rare bet on consumer crypto, and in Series B, Index and Union Square Ventures came in, shifting funding from "insider subscriptions for cold starts" to "consumer funds subscribing to super app narratives," expanding the target from meme coin trading to stocks, perpetuals, and prediction markets.
This structure is not akin to Robinhood's retail brokerage expansion, but is closer to the early AngelList model of turning users into investors, or OpenSea turning insiders and project parties into both shareholders and traffic sources. Fomo is in the expansion phase from tool to network: the execution layer has become homogeneous, and the moat is now composed of rankings, follow orders, and shareholders as content sources. Compared to bots that still rely on terminal efficiency and commissions to compete for the same batch of on-chain natives, it shifts the battlefield from crypto Twitter to Apple Pay and new users, reconstructing the trading funnel through consumer entry rather than creating a faster order placer within existing meme terminals.
The essence of structural change is the transfer of pricing power. Trading fees and attention are no longer priced solely by exchanges or aggregators, but by "who can turn opinion leaders into shareholders and then turn shareholders into distribution nodes." The mechanism is: equity turns word-of-mouth from a potential obligation into a potential benefit; once the product is genuinely used by angels, distribution costs decrease, and institutions are willing to bid at consumer multiples; conversely, an equity table with over 200 holders will raise governance and documentation costs in subsequent rounds, which is a trade-off of early distribution for later concentration.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Angels are not advisors; they are bullish options that only take effect after product success.
A list that can make calls is worth more than checks arriving first.
The more dispersed the equity, the faster the cold start, and the more expensive the next round of negotiations.