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 said it has backed at least five companies and plans to invest the remaining funds in at least 15 companies within the next year.
Max Rivera, former head of global partnerships at Snap, founded the fund in 2025 to formalize Snap's already growing angel investment community of alumni. Rivera runs the fund, but there are about 20 other founding members and investors, including 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, as well as a few still at Snap.
“The pairing was intentional,” Rivera, who now works at Microsoft's AI lab, told TechCrunch, noting that the Ghost Angels wanted to bring in former senior executives as well as early-career executives. “That diversity of thought and experience is core to how we evaluate deals and support founders.”
A lot has changed since he first joined Snap nearly a decade ago. People founding companies today have much leaner teams, but “founders are ramping up quickly and iterating in public.”
Image credit: Ghost Angels
“We are experimenting with different monetization models beyond subscriptions and advertising using tokens. [and] “Founders are even more at the forefront, with founder-led GTM becoming a key pillar,” he said.
Unsurprisingly, the fund focuses on pre-seed to seed investments in AI startups building for social media and consumer use. Rivera said one of the biggest trends he's noticed regarding the next generation of social media is how “social” and “media” are actually separated. The concept of what consumers know today as social media is a platform heavily reliant on advertising, with algorithms driving content and recommendations.
“A lot of people are disillusioned with it compared to its original promise of bringing people together in life,” Rivera said. TechCrunch reported last year that next-generation social media is moving from building general-purpose platforms to niche communities.
“On the social side, we are supporting founders who are applying AI in creative ways to ultimately realize their original promise,” Rivera continued. “On the media side, [we’re backing] AI-native formats and generative creative tools across a variety of media types, from music to games to sports to fashion, dramatically lower the barriers to production and distribution. ”
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