Fomo Co-Founders on Building the Social Network for Finance

FOMO was incorporated around December 30, 2024, and began raising in early January 2025. The three co-founders, Paul, Se, and Prashan, all spent approximately four years at DYDX before founding the company. The co-founder dynamic is deliberately structured around tension: Se is a trader and Paul describes himself as a normie user, creating a push-pull on every product decision that extends to 30-minute debates over small features. The company raised at a $550 million valuation through a party round of roughly 100 to 150 angel investors, chosen to bootstrap a two-sided marketplace by onboarding top traders and new traders simultaneously as early stakeholders. FOMO raised from Benchmark and Index Ventures rather than crypto VCs, on the theory that crypto VCs develop pattern-matching fatigue from repeated social trading pitches while generalist VCs evaluate each deal individually. Benchmark partner Jathan led the deal and said he understood the thesis within the first five minutes.

Paul argues that consumer crypto companies failed by over-indexing on crypto-native users, and that the daily active user base for crypto consumer apps sits at roughly 50,000 to 100,000 people, too small a total addressable market to build exclusively for. FOMO's stated positioning is as a consumer app built on crypto rails rather than a crypto consumer app, with the long-term goal of being the largest trading app in the world and the social layer of all finance. The founders argue blockchain suits this goal because it functions as a global distribution channel from day one and because its transparency automatically generates social data as a byproduct of trading activity. Prior social finance products like eToro's copy trading are acknowledged as comparable concepts, but the founders argue those failed because users could selectively show only chosen trades, creating confirmation bias. On-chain transparency removes that optionality.

FOMO has approximately 700,000 lifetime users, with roughly 30 percent of signups converting to depositing money. Crypto Twitter and native crypto traders represent roughly 10 percent of users but drive approximately 30 to 50 percent of trading volume. A breakout growth moment occurred during a company offsite in July 2025 when app stats approximately 10x overnight, driven by a TikTok and Instagram creator who turned out to be the co-founder's best friend's brother and was unaware his friend was running FOMO. Adding Apple Pay was separately described as FOMO's single biggest growth event, also roughly a 10x inflection, and the founders argue fiat on-ramp friction is the largest bottleneck in crypto and one most crypto products ignore because their existing users are already crypto-native.

Fees are five basis points on major assets including Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana and on perpetuals, and 50 basis points on long-tail spot trades. Robinhood charges approximately 85 basis points each way on Bitcoin trades by comparison. FOMO sponsors gas and priority fees on behalf of users and pays aggregators a monthly fee so they do not capture positive slippage, meaning trading majors on FOMO is effectively free. Spot trading is larger than perpetuals by at least an order of magnitude on volume and multiple orders of magnitude on users. FOMO integrated Hyperliquid builder code in two and a half weeks and has ranked as high as number two on the Hyperliquid builder code revenue leaderboard, with Phantom holding the number one position.

FOMO does not allow automatic copy trading because it creates incentives to trade differently and enables manipulation such as buying illiquid tokens and dumping on followers. Full on-chain transparency is described as a structural deterrent because reputation is publicly at stake. The platform requires users to attach a thesis to every trade rather than posting freeform text, making the thesis-plus-trade pairing the core unit of the product. FOMO does not allow wallet imports so all participants use identical tooling, reinforcing social graph trust at the cost of external growth.

FOMO raised $75 million in its most recent round to fortify its balance sheet against potential market downturns and had been profitable prior to that raise. The team is approximately 18 people. The founders have no current plans to launch a token and said they would more likely pursue a public listing, citing Robinhood and Coinbase as examples where being a public company builds consumer trust for a trading app. They argued that when a company launches a token the token becomes the entire product, and that no crypto token launch has ever had a major investment bank run a proper road show for distribution and liquidity the way an IPO does. The founders see a structural opportunity in companies staying private far longer, with pre-IPO perpetuals enabling price discovery earlier than traditional IPOs, and argued this can only happen on crypto rails. Their stated 2026 priority is to be the destination for yield, prediction markets, perpetuals, stocks, and tokenized equities, without expanding into unrelated products.