A group of 20 Snap alumni came together to launch 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 over the next year to at least 15 companies.
Max Rivera, who formerly led global partnerships at Snap, launched the fund in 2025 to formalize Snap’s already growing alumni angel investor community. Although Rivera leads the fund, there are about 20 other founding members and investors, a small number still at Snap, alongside alumni like Alexandra Levitt, who led Snap’s business 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 AI division, told TechCrunch, noting that Ghost Angels also wanted to bring in former senior executives alongside those earlier in their careers. “This diversity of thought and experience is at the heart of how we evaluate deals and support founders.”
A lot has changed since he started at Snap almost 10 years ago. Today, the people who start companies have much smaller teams, while “founders launch quickly and iterate in public.”
“We are seeing experimentation with different monetization models beyond ads with subscriptions, tokens [and] usage-based, or even outcomes-based,” he said. “Founders are also more at the forefront, with founder-led GTM as a key pillar.”
Meanwhile, Molly DeWolf Swenson, co-founder and CEO of portfolio company Ghost Angels Mozi, said that “Snap’s alumni network is full of brilliant and influential people who inherently understand the problem space I play in.”
Naturally, the fund focuses on investing in pre-seed AI startups that are expanding into social media and consumer. Rivera said one of the biggest trends he’s noticed about the next generation of social media is how “social” and “media” have actually become separated. The idea of what consumers today call social media is a platform that relies heavily on ads, with an algorithm that generates content and recommendations.
“A lot of people are disappointed by that initial promise of connecting people in your life,” Rivera said. TechCrunch reported last year that the next generation of social media was moving away from creating generalized platforms and toward niche communities.
“On a social level, we support founders who apply AI in creative ways to finally deliver on their original promise,” Rivera continued. “As for the media, [we’re backing] AI-native formats and generative creation tools across media types, from music and games to sports and fashion, that dramatically reduce barriers to creation and distribution.
This post has been updated to clarify where Max Rivera works.
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Dominic-Madori Davis is a senior venture capital and startup reporter at TechCrunch. She is based in New York.
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