FOMO Labs

FOMO Labs Inc. is the Delaware corporation behind fomo, a New York consumer-finance startup created by three former dYdX colleagues: Paul Martin Erlanger, Se Yong Park and Prashan Dharmasena. The legal company dates to 2024; product development and a closed TestFlight alpha were underway by early 2025, and the public app launched in May 2025. Erlanger is co-founder/CEO and previously led business development at dYdX after working in private credit at Deutsche Bank; he graduated summa cum laude from NYU. Park is a co-founder and product/ecosystem operator who worked with Erlanger at Deutsche Bank and later at dYdX and Eclipse; public founder profiles point to Yale, while one secondary database conflicts, so the exact degree remains unverified. Dharmasena is the engineering/mobile co-founder, with prior Android work at Square, Head of Mobile at OpenSea, and Head of Mobile and Frontend Platform at dYdX; he earned a Berkeley EECS degree. fomo raised a $2 million angel pre-seed announced February 18, 2025 from more than 140 operators and traders, deliberately distributing the cap table across crypto networks. Named participants included Solana co-founder Raj Gokal, Balaji Srinivasan, Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron, LayerZero CEO Bryan Pellegrino, Jito CEO Lucas Bruder, Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy, Privy CEO Henri Stern and investors/operators from Pantera, Dragonfly, Hack VC, Arbelos, Manifold, Eclipse, Sei, Berachain and other ecosystems. Benchmark then led a $17 million Series A announced November 6, 2025, with Archetype, Coinbase Ventures and another large group of angels, bringing disclosed cumulative funding to $19 million. The associated Form D is easy to overcount: it reported $19,302,410 sold but its clarification identifies $2,302,600 as converted securities, leaving $16,999,810 of new cash, effectively the public $17 million round. Chetan Puttagunta of Benchmark appears as a director in the subsequent filing. Index Ventures led a $75 million Series B announced June 22, 2026 at a reported $550 million valuation, with Union Square Ventures, existing investor Benchmark and angels including Mark Pincus, Kevin and Julia Hartz, Humam Sakhnini, Tomas Okmanas, Antoine Le Nel and others. Index partner Julia Andre appears as a director in the filing. The June 2 Form D covered a still-open $73,999,844 offering with $67,324,492 sold to 19 investors; the later company/Index announcement is the final $75 million round and should supersede that interim sold amount. Total disclosed cash funding is therefore $94 million, not the legacy database's $86.6 million sum of two raw Form D values. fomo combines an embedded, exportable, non-custodial wallet with a simplified trading and social layer. Users sign in with email or Apple ID, fund via Apple Pay, debit card or crypto, and trade from a unified USD balance across Solana, Base, BNB Chain and Monad without manually holding chain gas tokens or moving through bridges. On EVM chains its smart wallets use ERC-4337 account abstraction for gas sponsorship and transaction batching. The company says keys are split with Shamir Secret Sharing, reconstructed only in trusted execution environments, and protected by Face ID for access, withdrawal and export; Privy supplies wallet infrastructure. The July 2026 terms add an important caveat: exported wallet keys are transmitted unencrypted by Privy and Fomo disclaims responsibility for wallet/key security. Spot trading, live holdings, P&L, charts, token discovery, safety signals and trending assets sit alongside a social feed of real on-chain trades, following, profiles, leaderboards, comments, theses and sharing. Product positioning is the social layer of finance rather than a crypto exchange: users can see what people buy and hold and can execute through third-party decentralized protocols, while Fomo's terms characterize the service as a conduit rather than an exchange, DEX, broker, counterparty or transaction processor. The app is mobile-first and expanded to the web in 2026. In June 2026 it added perpetual futures through third-party decentralized infrastructure including Hyperliquid and Trade[XYZ], for eligible non-U.S. users; the contracts may reference crypto, equities, commodities, indices and other assets. It also exposes Robinhood Europe UAB stock/ETP derivative tokens via Uneven Labs' Relay API outside the U.S., Canada, U.K., Switzerland and other restricted jurisdictions. Those tokens are cash-settled OTC derivatives, not ownership in the referenced shares, and carry Robinhood counterparty risk. Spot transactions carry a minimum 0.50% Fomo fee with a $0.95 floor, plus possible third-party charges. Perpetuals carry a 0.05% Fomo fee in addition to protocol, gas and funding costs. Fees may change without notice, making transaction fees and ancillary/referral economics the principal visible revenue model; revenue, gross margin, retention and profitability are private. Growth has been unusually fast but all operating metrics are company or vendor reported. At the Series A, six months after beta launch, fomo said it had 120,000+ users, 35,000+ traders, nearly $700 million processed volume, $5 million of on-ramp volume from almost 15,000 first-time crypto users and roughly 10% weekly user growth. At the Series B it reported more than 625,000 people joined, more than $4 billion of trading volume, 110 million+ unique social interactions and 68,000+ first-time crypto buyers purchasing $25 million through Apple Pay. Fortune reported approximately 3,500 daily onboardings and 17 employees; Erlanger separately described a 17-person team intended to remain under 25. Mobula's earlier customer case study cited 120,000+ users, $20-$40 million of daily volume and approximately $150,000 daily revenue, but these are point-in-time, vendor/customer-supplied numbers rather than audited financials. Mobula powers discovery and token-risk data; its filters flag high sniper/developer/top-holder concentration, low liquidity and bundler/insider patterns. These controls reduce obvious hazards but cannot eliminate rugs, scams, wash trading or manipulated liquidity. Privy, Apple Pay/on-ramp providers, DEXs, smart contracts, routers/bridges, oracle networks, Hyperliquid, Trade[XYZ], Robinhood Europe and Uneven Labs create a large dependency and counterparty surface. Wallet/key-shard or TEE failure, email/Apple-ID takeover, phishing, smart-contract exploits, cross-chain routing failure, slippage/MEV, chain outages, stablecoin depegs, malicious tokens and insecure key export can cause irreversible loss. Social feeds, copy-like behavior, leaderboards, affiliate incentives and memecoin discovery can amplify FOMO, undisclosed promotion, momentum chasing, coordinated manipulation, bots and wash trading; the terms reserve broad power to recalculate metrics and claw back manipulated referrals. Regulatory exposure is material despite the non-custodial architecture because economic reality, control and solicitation matter more than a label. Potential regimes include SEC broker/dealer/exchange or securities-offering rules, CFTC derivatives/FCM/DCM/SEF rules, FinCEN and state money-transmission/BSA-AML requirements, sanctions/geolocation controls, commodities/securities classification, promotion/adviser rules and consumer-protection law. U.S.-person exclusion for perpetuals and tokenized derivatives requires robust KYC/geoblocking and monitoring. The February 2025 privacy policy covers identity/contact, wallet/payment, device/IP/location, usage, communications and social-login information, creating privacy, account-linkage and breach risk; it also predates major 2026 product expansion and should be reviewed for operational alignment. Terms require users to be 18+, contain New York individual arbitration, class/jury waiver and a one-year claim limit. No material Fomo-specific litigation, regulator action or confirmed breach was found in manual review as of August 17, 2026. Direct competitors include Coinbase, Robinhood, Phantom, Jupiter, Binance, Moonshot, Hyperliquid front ends, BullX/Photon/Trojan-style tools and social-investing platforms such as eToro. fomo's differentiation is a consumer-grade, sub-30-second, non-custodial multichain onboarding flow combined with a real social graph and broader on-chain asset ambition. Key diligence gaps are audited revenue/retention/unit economics, exact routing and custody dependencies, security and penetration results, key-shard/TEE and export controls, geo-restriction effectiveness, active-versus-funded users, wash-trading adjustment, cap-table detail, market-making/liquidity relationships and regulatory analysis by jurisdiction.

Founding story

Former dYdX colleagues Erlanger, Park and Dharmasena saw that fragmented chains, wallets, liquidity, gas and bridges made on-chain trading inaccessible. They formed FOMO Labs in late 2024, assembled 140+ strategic angels, shipped a closed TestFlight alpha in early 2025 and publicly launched in May around a one-balance, one-swipe social trading experience.

Business model

Consumer fintech/on-chain trading interface and social network monetized primarily through transaction fees while third-party protocols execute and settle trades.

At least 0.50% per spot buy/sell with a $0.95 minimum, and 0.05% per perpetual transaction, plus possible referral/partner economics; third-party protocol, gas, funding and payment fees are separate. No subscription or audited revenue disclosure.

Traction

Company-reported: 95k waitlist Feb 2025; 120k+ users, 35k+ traders, nearly $700m volume and ~10% weekly growth by Nov 2025; 625k+ joined, $4bn+ volume, 110m+ social interactions and 68k+ first-time buyers/$25m Apple Pay purchases by Jun 2026. Fortune reported ~3,500 daily onboardings and 17 employees.

Latest developments

In June-July 2026 fomo added perpetuals and access to Robinhood Europe stock/ETP derivative tokens for eligible non-U.S. users, expanded its current terms/risk disclosures and closed a $75m Index-led Series B. The company reports 625k+ joined and $4bn+ volume.