From Beta App to Chart-Topper
Fomo launched its public beta in May 2025, founded by Paul Erlanger and Se Yong Park. A little over a year later, it has done something few crypto-native apps manage, i.e. crack the general finance charts, not just the crypto ones.
By August 21, Fomo had climbed into the top five U.S. finance apps on Apple’s App Store, surpassing Cash App and briefly reaching as high as third place, ahead of prediction-market rival Kalshi. It currently is in the top 15.
Typically, finance-app rankings on the App Store are dominated by giants like banks and payment apps, not crypto-native startups, so cracking even the top fifteen has put Fomo in company normally reserved for far more established brands.
The Money Behind the Momentum
In November 2025, the startup closed a $17 million Series A led by Benchmark. Rather than shopping the round to institutional funds, Erlanger and Park drew up a wishlist of 200 dream angel investors; 140 of them wrote checks, including Polygon Labs chief executive Marc Boiron, Solana co-founder Raj Gokal and former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan.
The round was followed by a Series B, which saw the firm raise an additional $75 million, all at a time when its user base had surpassed 600,000 and more than $4 billion in trading volume. The deal brought Fomo’s total disclosed equity funding to roughly $94 million.
Why People Are Actually Using It
Fomo’s pitch is less about charts and more about friends. The app lets users see what people they follow are trading in real time, track leaderboards, and copy trading signals, all funded instantly through Apple Pay.
Simply put, the app makes crypto trading feel like a social media experience rather than a Bloomberg terminal cosplay session, supporting trading across Solana, Base, BNB Chain, Monad, and Robinhood Chain, giving it reach well beyond any single ecosystem.
Moreover, the app currently holds a 4.6-to-4.8-star rating on Apple’s App Store, with more than 14,000 reviews, and a 4.7 rating on Google Play, where it has passed a million installs.
Fomo’s growth is tangled up with the broader momentum around Robinhood Chain, the brokerage’s own layer-2 network, which launched its public mainnet on July 1 and has since become one of the more closely watched experiments in bringing retail trading onchain.
Fomo is one of several consumer apps positioning itself to capture that traffic, part of a wider wave of “social trading” products betting that copying friends, not reading charts, is what gets casual users to actually place a trade. Industry watchers increasingly see apps like Fomo as the friendliest on-ramp for a new, less experienced wave of retail traders, the same audience Robinhood itself built its stock-trading business around.
