ArticlePropose editHistory

Paul Erlanger

From memecoin.wiki, the free memecoin encyclopedia
Paul Erlanger
Paul Erlanger
Image: X profile avatar of @PaulErlanger
handle@PaulErlanger
roleco founder and CEO of fomo
known forfomo app, ex dYdX, Benchmark backed consumer trading

Paul Erlanger is the co founder and CEO of fomo, the mobile first crypto trading app that raised a Benchmark led Series A in 2025 and a $75 million Series B at a $550 million valuation in 2026.

Contents
  1. 1 Background
  2. 2 fomo
  3. 3 Fundraising
  4. 4 Poaching by pump.fun
  5. 5 Management style
  6. 6 Significance
  7. 7 References

Paul Erlanger is the co founder and CEO of fomo, the consumer crypto trading app that became one of the best funded attempts to package the experience of the trenches for a mainstream audience. He founded the company with Se Yong Park, known in crypto as seyong, and Prashan Dharmasena. Erlanger and Park worked together for about five years across Deutsche Bank and the decentralized exchange dYdX, while Dharmasena, the mobile engineering co founder, came to the company through Android engineering at Square, head of mobile at OpenSea, and head of mobile and frontend at dYdX, an unusually traditional pedigree for a meme coin adjacent product.

Background

Erlanger graduated from NYU with summa cum laude honors and worked in private credit at Deutsche Bank before crypto. From July 2021 to October 2024 he was head of business development at dYdX, the role from which he left to build fomo. His personal X account, @PaulErlanger, dates to January 2010 and carried the minimalist bio "Cofounder @fomo" with about 9,800 followers in August 2026; Twitterscore lists ZachXBT, Solana founder Toly, Kyle Samani, Laura Shin, and Threadguy among its followers. Park is a Yale alumnus who held ecosystem roles at dYdX and Eclipse; Dharmasena studied EECS at Berkeley.

fomo

fomo Labs Inc. incorporated in Delaware in 2024, announced a 2 million dollar pre seed on February 18, 2025 before the product was public, and opened its public beta on May 6, 2025. The app is mobile first, giving users a single balance across four chains, gasless swaps, Apple Pay deposits, and a social feed showing what real traders are doing alongside copy trading tools. The design bet is that the next wave of on chain traders will never use a terminal, a Telegram bot or a bridge, and that social context, seeing friends and known traders move, matters more than charts. That thesis put fomo in direct competition with axiom, gmgn and the incumbent bots for the retail flow that launchpads like pump fun generate. By June 2026 Erlanger was citing roughly 600,000 users, over 4 billion dollars of cumulative trading volume, about 110 million social interactions, 68,000 first time crypto buyers, and roughly 50,000 to 60,000 daily active users, all self reported in interviews and all delivered by a team of 17. FinTech Global noted that several fomo creators passed 100,000 in app followers within twelve months of launch.

Consumer reviews describe fomo's fee as a flat 0.5 percent per transaction and criticize the app's social leaderboard for encouraging users to chase trending coins. Security writeups have flagged a typosquat scam domain, fomoo.family, impersonating the app.

Fundraising

The company's fundraising became a story in itself. Instead of a conventional seed round, the founders drew up a list of 200 people they wanted as angels and pitched them individually; 140 wrote checks, among them Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron, Solana co founder Raj Gokal, and Balaji Srinivasan. "We knew that every single person would be valuable to us in the business," Erlanger told TechCrunch. In November 2025 fomo announced a $17 million Series A led by Benchmark's Chetan Puttagunta as sole institutional investor, one of the storied venture firm's rare crypto investments, bringing total funding to $19 million. TechCrunch framed the deal as Benchmark betting on consumer crypto at the exact moment decentralized exchange volume was reshaping retail trading; at the time Erlanger said fomo was doing about 20 to 40 million dollars in volume a day and "about $150,000 in revenue a day" with more than 120,000 users onboarded. In June 2026 the company raised a $75 million Series B at a $550 million valuation led by Index Ventures partner Julia Andre alongside Union Square Ventures, covered by Fortune, making fomo one of the most valuable consumer facing companies to emerge from the meme coin era. The round funds expansion into equities, perpetuals, and prediction markets on top of the trading and social ecosystem.

Poaching by pump.fun

On August 8, 2026, leaked contracts reported by Odaily and Memeburn showed pump fun offering fomo traders a 20,000 dollar one time signing bonus plus a 30,000 dollar monthly retainer, roughly 380,000 dollars a year per recruited trader, to migrate off fomo. The contract reportedly barred recruits from trading on fomo, gmgn or axiom during the term, required closing fomo accounts, migrating funds to a new pump.fun wallet, linking public X accounts, and at least four public uses of pump.fun's "callout" feature a month, with payout gated on hitting 25 percent of the trader's prior fomo monthly volume or 25,000 dollars, whichever was greater. Crypto lawyer Ariel Givner was quoted saying the poaching campaign "do[es] not violate laws and regulations." No public reaction from fomo, Erlanger, or pump.fun itself was located.

Management style

Erlanger's operating style is part of his public persona: no managers, no one on one meetings, founder level equity for employees, and a stated plan to stay under 25 people while scaling. The 20VC podcast, which bills him as fomo's CEO, titled its episode around his argument that one on ones are BS. His product philosophy is stated just as directly: "Most trading products aren't built with the user in mind. They are dull, hard to understand, and make you want to rip your hair out. Each decision we make at fomo is made to bring our users joy."

Significance

Erlanger and his co founders represent a second generation of trench builders: rather than launching a casino, they are building the brokerage layer on top of it, with blue chip venture money behind them. His stated ambitions run well past crypto: "The goal on Fomo is that you never miss out again," he told Fortune, adding "The goal is for it not to be seen as a crypto app" and "The goal is to be the largest trading app in the world." Whether a polished app can capture flow from the degens who live in terminals remains the open question of fomo's story.

References

See also
  • Pentoshi Pentoshi is a pseudonymous analyst with a penguin avatar whose high time frame market call
  • Poe Poe is a pseudonymous memecoin caller on Crypto Twitter who runs the Catfish Calls by Poe
  • PoorGoat PoorGoat is a pseudonymous Solana memecoin trader who led the accidental community takeove
  • Pow Pow is a pseudonymous Solana memecoin trader and caller whose position posts reach one of
  • Publix Publix is a pseudonymous Solana memecoin trader who posts daily profit and loss updates an
Category: People
Last updated 2026-08-19