Fomo raises $17M from Benchmark to become the largest crypto-native financial platform
Nov 6, 2025 with Paul Erlanger
Key Points
- Fomo raises $17M from Benchmark to build a consumer crypto trading app that replaces wallet setup and asset discovery friction with Apple ID onboarding and Apple Pay funding.
- Six months post-launch, Fomo has 120,000 users and $20–40M daily volume by offering public portfolio visibility and access to millions of assets versus 50–90 on centralized exchanges.
- Fomo plans to expand beyond crypto into equities, bonds, and prediction markets with no token, signaling Benchmark's bet on consumer adoption without token price exposure.
Summary
Fomo, a crypto-native consumer finance app, has closed a $17 million seed round led by Benchmark, positioning itself as a direct challenger to centralised exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken. The company's pitch is structural, not speculative: replace the fragmented, multi-step onboarding process of decentralised finance with a single app that handles wallet creation, asset discovery, and execution in a consumer-grade interface.
Fomo's founder K frames the product as a social-first trading platform built entirely on-chain. Users onboard via Apple ID, fund accounts with Apple Pay, and gain immediate access to millions of digital assets, compared to the 50–90 assets available on most centralised exchanges. A core differentiator is full public portfolio visibility, meaning any user can see the complete trade history of any other user on the platform, a transparency layer that incumbents cannot easily replicate.
Six months post-launch, Fomo has onboarded 120,000 users and is processing $20–40 million in daily trading volume. The company estimates it currently accounts for roughly 0.1% of Solana's on-chain spot volume, which runs at approximately $320 billion per quarter. The near-term roadmap targets full multi-chain coverage and dominance of the on-chain spot market within six months.
The asset roadmap extends well beyond crypto. Fomo plans to add equities, bonds, repo assets, prediction markets, and on-chain savings accounts offering DeFi yield. K acknowledges that on-chain equities are still nascent but points to moves by Robinhood and Kraken to tokenise traditional equities as a near-term on-ramp, with regulatory clarity on native digital asset equity issuances expected to follow congressional market structure legislation.
Benchmark's involvement is notable for its pattern. Its most recent prior crypto investment was Chainalysis, another infrastructure-adjacent bet with no native token. Fomo also has no token and no plans to issue one, suggesting Benchmark is deliberately targeting businesses that monetise crypto adoption without direct exposure to token price volatility.
The team sits at 10 people, with backgrounds spanning dYdX, Uniswap, and OpenSea. K argues that the combination of DeFi infrastructure engineering and consumer UX design in a single small team is itself the competitive moat, a capability gap he says no existing platform has successfully closed.