A group of 20 Snap alumni came together to create a fund called Ghost Angels to support 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 to at least 15 companies.
Max Rivera, who once headed global partnerships at Snap, launched the fund in 2025 to formalize Snap’s already growing alumni community of angel investors. Although Rivera manages the fund, there are about 20 other founding members and investors, including a small number who are still at Snap, along with alumni such as 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 in Microsoft’s artificial intelligence division, told TechCrunch, noting that Ghost Angels wanted to bring in former senior executives as well as those who were earlier in their careers. “This diversity of thought and experience is core to how we evaluate deals and support founders.”
A lot has changed since he first started at Snap nearly 10 years ago. Today, people-building companies have much leaner teams, while “founders launch quickly and iterate publicly.”
“We’re seeing experimentation of different monetization models beyond subscription ads, subtly [and] usage-based or even outcome-based,” he said. “Founders are also more at the forefront, with founder-led GTM as a key pillar.”
At the same time, Molly DeWolf Swenson, co-founder and CEO of Ghost Angels portfolio company Mozi, said that “Snap’s alumni network is full of brilliant, influential people who intrinsically understand the problem space in which I play.”
Of course, the fund is focused on investing in pre-seed to seed AI startups that grow social media and consumers. Rivera said one of the biggest trends he’s noticed about the next generation of social media is how “social” and “media” have really become separated. The concept of what consumers know as social media today is a heavily ad-driven platform with an algorithm driving content and recommendations.
“A lot of people are disappointed with it over the original promise of connecting people in your life,” Rivera said. TechCrunch reported last year that the next generation of social media is moving away from creating generalized platforms and toward niche communities.
“On the social side, we’re supporting founders who are applying AI in creative ways to finally achieve that original promise,” Rivera continued. “On the media side, [we’re backing] Native forms of artificial intelligence and creative creation tools across different types of media, from music to games, sports and fashion, dramatically lower the barrier to creation and distribution.”
This post has been updated to clarify where Max Rivera works.
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