A group of twenty Snap alumni have come together to create a fund called Ghost Angels, to support the next generation of social media. The fund declined to reveal how much it has raised so far, but says it has backed at least five companies and plans to invest the remaining capital in at least 15 companies over the next year.
Max Rivera, who once led global partnerships at Snap, started the fund in 2025 to formalize the already growing community of Snap alumni angel investors. While Rivera manages the fund, there are about 20 other founders and investors, including a small number of those still at Snap, in addition to 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 this mix,” Rivera, who currently works at Microsoft’s AI lab, told JS, noting that Ghost Angels also wanted to bring in former senior executives in addition to those earlier in their careers. “That 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 a decade ago. Today, people-building companies have much leaner teams, while “founders hit the ground running and repeat themselves publicly.”
“We’re seeing experimentation with different monetization models, in addition to subscription and token advertising [and] usage-based, or even results-based,” he said. “Founders are also more at the forefront, with founder-led GTM as a key pillar.”
Naturally, the fund focuses on investing in pre-seed-to-seed AI startups that focus on social media and consumers. Rivera said one of the biggest trends he’s noticed in the next generation of social media is how “social” and “media” have effectively become separated. The idea of what consumers today know as social media is a platform that relies heavily on advertising, with an algorithm that drives content and recommendations.
“A lot of people are disillusioned with that, compared to the original promise of connecting people in your life,” Rivera said. JS reported last year that the next generation of social media was turning away from building generic platforms and focusing on niche communities.
“On the social side, we support founders who are applying AI in creative ways to finally deliver on that original promise,” Rivera continued. “On the media side [we’re backing] Native AI formats and generative creative tools for different media types, from music to gaming, sports and fashion, that dramatically lower the barrier to creation and distribution.”
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