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 division, 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.”
This post was updated to clarify where Max Rivera works.
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