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