A group of 20 Snap alumni have come together to create a foundation 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 deploy the remaining capital to at least 15 companies over the next year.
Max Rivera, who once led global partnerships at Snap, launched a fund in 2025 to formalize the already growing Snap alumni angel investment community. While Rivera leads the fund, there are about 20 other founders and investors, including alumni like Alexandra Levitt, who runs Snap’s corporate accelerator, and Will Wu, a founding member of Snap’s product and design team, as well as a handful of those still at Snap.
Rivera, who works at Microsoft’s artificial intelligence lab, told TechCrunch that Ghost Angels wants to bring in former senior executives as well as those in their own careers. “Diversity of thought and experience is fundamental to how we evaluate deals and support founders.”
A lot has changed since he first started at Snap nearly 10 years ago. People building companies today have leaner teams, “founders launch quickly and iterate publicly.”
“We’re seeing trials of different monetization models beyond subscriptions, tokens (and) usage-based or even outcome-based advertising,” he said. “Founders are also more at the forefront, founder-led GTM is a key pillar.”
Of course, the fund is focused on investing in social media and consumer-based AI startups. Rivera said one of the biggest trends he’s noticed about the next generation of social media is how “social” and “media” are actually separating. The idea of what consumers know today as social media is an advertising-based platform with an algorithm that drives content and recommendations.
“A lot of people get frustrated with the initial promise of connecting the people in your life,” Rivera said. TechCrunch reported last year the next generation of social media was moving away from building generalized platforms towards niche communities.
“On the social side, we’re supporting founders who are using AI in creative ways to finally deliver on that early promise,” said Rivera. “On the media side, (we support) AI dramatically lowers the barrier to creating and distributing native formats and generative creative tools across media types from music to gaming to sports to fashion.”
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