Snap Alumni Launch Ghost Angels Fund to Back Next Generation of Social Media Startups

A group of 20 former Snap employees has formalized an angel-investing community into a fund called Ghost Angels, targeting pre-seed and seed-stage startups building at the intersection of artificial intelligence, social media, and consumer technology.

The fund declined to disclose the total amount raised but said it has already backed at least five companies and plans to deploy its remaining capital into at least 15 more within the next year.

Max Rivera, who previously led global partnerships at Snap and now works at Microsoft's AI lab, founded Ghost Angels in 2025 to give structure to what had already become an informal network of Snap alumni investing in early-stage companies.

Alongside Rivera, the fund counts roughly 20 founder members and investors. They include Alexandra Levitt, who ran Snap's corporate accelerator, and Will Wu, a founding member of Snap's product and design team. A small number of current Snap employees are also involved.

"We were intentional about the mix," Rivera told TechCrunch, noting that the fund sought to combine former senior executives with investors earlier in their careers. "That diversity of thought and experience is core to how we evaluate deals and support founders."

Rivera said the founding premise of Ghost Angels rests on a shift he has observed since joining Snap nearly a decade ago. Today's founders, he said, operate with leaner teams and move faster. "Founders are launching fast and iterating in public," he said.

The fund is built around a thesis that "social" and "media" — long bundled under the single label of social media — have effectively split into two distinct categories, each with its own investment logic.

On the social side, Ghost Angels is backing founders applying AI toward what Rivera described as the original promise of social platforms: connecting people in their personal lives, as opposed to algorithmic content feeds driven by advertising revenue. "A lot of people are disillusioned with that relative to the original promise of connecting people in your life," Rivera said.

On the media side, the fund is focused on AI-native content formats and generative creative tools spanning music, gaming, sports, and fashion — areas Rivera said are dramatically lowering the barrier to content creation and distribution.

Rivera also pointed to evolving monetization models as a defining characteristic of the next wave of startups entering the space. "We're seeing experimentation of different monetization models beyond ads with subscriptions, token [and] usage-based, or even outcome-based," he said.

The launch comes as venture interest in consumer AI and next-generation social platforms has intensified, with a broader push by investors to identify which emerging formats and communities will define the post-algorithmic internet. Ghost Angels positions itself as a specialized vehicle — drawing on operational experience inside one of the industry's defining platforms — to evaluate that landscape from the inside out.

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