This week, trading app Fomo announced its close of a $75 million Series B, an outlier in a funding market where rounds that size have gone quiet.
Most raises are not pulling nine figures right now, and the ones that are tend to sell institutional infrastructure, not a trading app built for normal people. So the round is worth taking note of.
It only makes sense once you see what Fomo actually is: the latest, and so far the most successful, product in a long evolution of social trading.
As those in crypto know, investing increasingly originates from feeds. Instead of consulting brokers, investors, particularly younger ones, turn to Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit.
Nowhere is this more the case than in crypto given how central Twitter is to our industry, directing flows just as much as it does discussion and interaction. And because all of it happens onchain, where wallets and balances are public, the dynamic only sharpens. Traders follow KOLs, watch wallets, track what they're buying, and try to front-run where liquidity moves next.
To do so, they stitched together Twitter feeds, wallet trackers, terminals, Telegram bots, and a DEX interface. This put a barrier around the great game of speculation: most people weren't able or willing to go to those lengths.
Fomo, and other apps like it, intend to change that.
Fomo's founder Se Yong Park, who recently came on the Bankless podcast, calls the app "trading for the rest of us."
The app collapses the whole social stack traders used to assemble by hand into one feed: discovery, execution, identity, reputation, public theses, and visible buys and sells. You sign in with Google or Apple, fund with Apple Pay, a debit card, a bank transfer, or crypto, and start trading without ever touching a wallet, gas, a bridge, or a chain you have to think about.
Out of the 650,000 signups Fomo's had so far, roughly 30% converted into traders, so close to 200,000 people have ever placed a trade. About 70,000 of them arrived through traditional fiat onramps rather than crypto rails, showcasing the success of Fomo's formula in expanding past the already tapped out, crypto-native crowd.
Fomo is by no means the only company building for this new era of investing. In May we saw the release of Robinhood Social in beta, a feed for finding and tracking trades and traders. Elsewhere in crypto, Bullpen and Legend Trade continue to develop perpetuals trading into something like a sport while paste.trade is translating financial content (podcasts, newsletters) into an ever-updating feed of trades to tail.