Paul Erlanger has found a way to make selling too early into a social event. On fomo, the trading app he co-founded, a position can become a shareable card. So can a fumble: the awkward gap between the price at which someone sold and the price the asset reached afterward. A private regret acquires an audience. Finance has always offered ample opportunities for embarrassment. Erlanger has given one of them a distribution channel.
It is a useful introduction to a founder who thinks the relationships around a trade deserve as much attention as the trade itself. People already exchange tips, boast about winners and ask friends what they bought. His proposition is to put those conversations beside a visible record of what actually happened. The portfolio becomes part of the profile. An opinion comes with a position attached.
Erlanger is the New York-based co-founder and CEO of fomo, alongside co-founders Se Yong Park and Prashan Dharmasena. His route runs through New York University, Deutsche Bank and the decentralized exchange dYdX. But the business he is building has the preoccupations of a consumer social product: identity, discovery, reputation, taste. Somewhere between the balance sheet and the group chat, he sees room for a company.
A partnership that survived a change of financial systems
The chronology begins before crypto. Erlanger attended NYU from 2016 to 2020 and graduated summa cum laude. While a student, he was a founder of Rogue Aerospace, a venture that appears in his early employment history from 2017 to 2019. He also worked in research and business development at Venture Out. Starting things and working on their commercial side were already running in parallel.
Deutsche Bank came next. He worked as an analyst in private credit before moving into business development at dYdX, where his tenure ran from 2021 to 2024. That sequence placed him on both sides of a practical divide: established financial institutions and markets operating on decentralized infrastructure. It also supplied a lasting working relationship. Erlanger and Park worked together at Deutsche Bank, then at dYdX, before founding fomo.
By the time of fomo's June 2026 financing, their partnership stretched back roughly five years. They had changed employers and financial machinery without changing partners. That continuity matters to this story. The ambition was broad, but the people pursuing it had already spent years seeing each other work. The third co-founder, Dharmasena, helped build the consumer technology that would conceal much of the machinery from the customer.
Before the social network, a network of backers
In February 2025, fomo announced a $2 million pre-seed backed by more than 140 angels. The roster included Solana co-founder Raj Gokal, Balaji Srinivasan, LayerZero's Bryan Pellegrino and Polygon Labs' Marc Boiron. It was an unusually populous beginning for a young company. The list brought together people building the infrastructure, products and businesses through which the founders hoped their own app would travel.
Read as an operating choice, the round fits Erlanger's larger interest in networks. An investor can contribute a check, but also a working relationship, an introduction or early feedback. A crowd of backers creates more possible connections than one name on a capitalization table. It does, presumably, make the company update a somewhat busier email. The public announcement treated those individuals as part of the company's beginning, giving the roster considerable space.
The app entered beta in May 2025. By November, fomo said it had attracted more than 120,000 users and 35,000 traders, processing nearly $700 million in volume. The distinction between users and traders is worth keeping: downloading, joining and actually trading describe different levels of participation. Erlanger was building a financial product whose audience could also watch, follow and learn the habits of other participants.
Benchmark led the $17 million Series A announced on November 6, 2025, taking disclosed funding to $19 million. By June 22, 2026, Index Ventures was leading a $75 million Series B with Union Square Ventures and Benchmark participating. The June announcements put cumulative trading volume above $4 billion. The scale had changed quickly. The central idea remained recognizable: make access simpler, then let people discover markets through one another.
The fifteen-minute ambition
Erlanger's description of the intended experience is unusually domestic for a business built on blockchains. He wants the app to be understandable in fifteen minutes. His complaint about trading products is that they are confusing and unpleasant to use. In June, he said product decisions should make the experience enjoyable for the people using it.
Joy is a demanding brief for software that moves money. It cannot be delivered by a cheerful color palette alone. The proposed convenience sits beneath the interface: account setup, wallets, transaction routing and movement between networks. A customer sees an app and a balance while the product handles technical steps in the background. Erlanger's work is partly translation, turning a complicated arrangement of financial tools into something a person can recognize and use.
That translation also explains why social discovery matters to him. Access has two parts in his formulation: being able to use a market and being able to discover it. A technically available asset is of little practical interest to someone who never encounters it or understands why others care. Following another trader gives the interface a human starting point. The first question becomes who to pay attention to.
“Each decision we make at fomo is made to bring our users joy.”
Paul Erlanger · June 2026
The opinion with a public record
On fomo, positions and trades are public within the network. Users can follow holdings, inspect performance and attach a thesis to a transaction. A trader can explain an idea and show the action taken on it in the same place. This creates a particular kind of reputation: an audience can compare a person's commentary with the behavior recorded on the platform.
There is an obvious appeal to that arrangement in an internet crowded with confident predictions. The screenshot of a winning trade is a familiar piece of financial theater. A continuing public record asks more of the performer. It also gives a follower more to inspect than the occasional victory lap. Erlanger's ambition is to make that record useful enough that people return for the people as well as the assets.
His broader vision extends across different markets. Someone with a view on an event might express it through an equity, a commodity-linked position or a prediction market. Erlanger sees the relationships between people as the connection between those choices. This remains an ambition as well as a product direction; it is not a claim that every instrument is already available everywhere. What interests him is an identity that persists as the range of things to trade expands.
- Express a viewExplain the thinking behind a position.
- Make it visibleLet the network follow trading activity.
- Build a reputationGive an audience a record to inspect.
Being visible does not make a trade right
The attraction of a public record deserves a careful distinction. It can show what someone did. It cannot establish that the next person following them will get the same result. Entry prices, timing and fees still matter. A visible position carries information, but popularity supplies no guarantee about its eventual value. A network can make a decision easier to discover while leaving the decision itself difficult.
An October 2026 analysis covering 829,539 wallets that bought coins through fomo on Solana between January 13 and October 7 found that about 90 percent were behind after fees. The median wallet lost $25. Those findings concern the study's Solana wallets and accounting window, rather than every user or market on the app. They provide a necessary counterweight to the growth figures: attracting participants and producing profitable participants are different achievements.
For Erlanger, this is the demanding part of the accessibility project. A simpler experience can remove technical obstacles. It still has to earn trust from people whose results will vary. The public nature of the product gives that question particular force. Its reputation will develop alongside the reputations of the traders using it.
The founder who revised his own premise
Erlanger has acknowledged changing his mind about how deliberately fomo needed to build its social relationships. He initially expected trading activity to draw people in and the network to develop from there. His later view was that those connections needed active attention. The admission is revealing: the defining feature of the company was also something its founder had to learn how to cultivate.
In June, he described a 17-person company with a flat structure and considerable autonomy. The early core team had worked for eight months without pay, receiving substantial ownership. That was his account of a particular founding group, rather than a formula for everyone. His preferred lesson for himself was more personal: have difficult conversations earlier. A CEO can redesign an interface more readily than an awkward conversation.
There are lighter ambitions, too. Asked which sports team he would want fomo to sponsor, Erlanger picked the New York Knicks without hesitation. The answer locates a global financial ambition in a very particular city. For now, his more immediate project is the daily work with his co-founders and team. He has described the pleasure of building with them as a motivation in itself. The public record may be the product. The people around him are why he wants to keep making it.