Snap alumni launch Ghost Angels fund to back AI startups redefining social media

Snap alums unveil Ghost Angels fund

A group of 20 Snap alumni has come together to launch a fund called Ghost Angels to back the next generation of social media. The fund declined to disclose how much it has raised so far, but says it has backed at least five companies and plans to deploy the remaining capital within the next year into at least 15 companies. Max Rivera, who once led global partnerships at Snap, started the fund in 2025 to formalize the already-growing Snap alumni angel-investing community. Though Rivera runs the fund, there are around 20 other founder members and investors, including a small number of those still at Snap, alongside alumni like Alexandra Levitt, who ran Snap's corporate accelerator, and Will Wu, who was a founding member of Snap's product and design team. "We were intentional about the mix," Rivera, who currently works at Microsoft's AI lab, told TechCrunch, noting that Ghost Angels wanted to bring in former senior executives alongside those earlier in their careers, too. "That diversity of thought and experience is core to how we evaluate deals and support founders." Much has changed since he first started at Snap nearly 10 years ago. Today, the people building companies have much leaner teams, while "founders are launching fast and iterating in public." "We're seeing experimentation of different monetization models beyond ads with subscriptions, token [and] usage-based, or even outcome-based," he said. "Founders are also more in the forefront, with founder-led GTM as a key pillar." Naturally, the fund is focused on investing in pre-seed to seed AI startups that are building in social media and consumer. Rivera said one of the biggest trends he has noticed about the next generation of social media is how "social" and "media" have actually split. The idea of what consumers know as social media today is a platform that relies heavily on ads, with an algorithm driving content and recommendations. "A lot of people are disillusioned with that relative to the original promise of connecting people in your life," Rivera said. TechCrunch reported last year that the next generation of social media was moving away from building generalized platforms and toward niche communities. "On the social side, we're backing founders that are applying AI in creative ways to finally deliver on that original promise," Rivera continued. "On the media side, [we're backing] AI native formats and generative creative tools across different media types, from music to gaming, sports, and fashion, that are dramatically lowering the barrier to creation and distribution."

20 Snap alumni launched an angel fund for the next generation of social media. They think "social" and "media" have split.

20 Snap alumni launched Ghost Angels to back AI startups building beyond the ad-driven social media model. Five deals done, 15 more planned. Twenty Snap alumni have launched Ghost Angels, an angel fund backing the next generation of social media and consumer AI startups. The fund has invested in at least five companies and plans to deploy remaining capital into at least 15 more within the next year. It declined to disclose total fund size. Max Rivera, who led global partnerships at Snap, started the fund in 2025 to formalise an already growing alumni angel community. He currently works at Microsoft's AI division. The roughly 20 founder members include Alexandra Levitt, who ran Snap's corporate accelerator, and Will Wu, a founding member of Snap's product and design team. "We were intentional about the mix," Rivera told TechCrunch. "That diversity of thought and experience is core to how we evaluate deals and support founders." The membership includes former senior executives alongside people earlier in their careers, plus a small number who still work at Snap. Ghost Angels invests at pre-seed to seed stage in AI startups building in social media and consumer. Rivera said the biggest trend he has noticed is that "social" and "media" have actually split into two distinct categories. What consumers know as social media today is a platform that relies on ads, with algorithms driving content and recommendations. "A lot of people are disillusioned with that relative to the original promise of connecting people in your life," Rivera said. The next generation is moving away from generalised platforms and toward niche communities. Ghost Angels is backing both sides of the split. On the social side, founders are applying AI to deliver on the original promise of human connection. On the media side, AI-native formats and generative creative tools are lowering the barrier to creation and distribution across music, gaming, sports, and fashion. Rivera has noticed that today's founders operate differently from when he joined Snap nearly a decade ago. Teams are leaner. Founders launch fast and iterate in public. Monetisation is diversifying beyond ads into subscriptions, token-based models, usage-based pricing, and outcome-based revenue. Meta's launch of Forum this week underscores how the incumbents are also sensing the split. Forum, a standalone app built from Facebook Groups, is designed to capture the community discussion use case that Reddit currently dominates. The fact that Meta is unbundling Groups into a separate app validates Ghost Angels' thesis that niche community tools are the next category. Molly DeWolf Swenson, co-founder and CEO of portfolio company Mozi, said the "Snap alumni network is full of brilliant, influential people who inherently understand the problem space I'm playing in." The fund's value proposition to founders is not just capital but domain expertise from people who helped build one of the defining social platforms of the last decade. The broader startup landscape is rewarding AI-native approaches that build for new categories rather than optimising existing ones. Peec AI hit $10 million ARR in six months by building for generative engine optimisation, a category that barely existed before ChatGPT changed how people search. Ghost Angels is betting that the same dynamic applies to social: the platforms that win will be built for AI-native interaction, not retrofitted with AI features. The Snap alumni network is one of the most active in consumer tech. Snapchat's culture of experimentation, its bet on ephemeral content, its early investment in AR, and its willingness to build products that looked strange before they looked obvious produced a generation of product thinkers who now see the next cycle forming. Ghost Angels is the vehicle for putting that conviction to work.