20 Snap Alumni Launch Angel Fund for Next Gen Social Media
Twenty Snap alumni have launched Ghost Angels, an angel fund backing the next generation of social media and consumer AI startups. The fund has invested in at least five companies and plans to deploy remaining capital into at least 15 more within the next year, though they declined to disclose total fund size.
Max Rivera, who led global partnerships at Snap, started the fund in 2025 to formalize an already growing alumni angel community. He currently works at Microsoft’s AI division. The roughly 20 founder members include Alexandra Levitt, who ran Snap’s corporate accelerator, and Will Wu, a founding member of Snap’s product and design team.
"We were intentional about the mix," Rivera told TechCrunch. "That diversity of thought and experience is core to how we evaluate deals and support founders."
Ghost Angels invests at pre-seed to seed stage in AI startups building in social media and consumer. Rivera noted that “social” and “media” have actually split into two distinct categories:
- Social: Platforms relying on ads, with algorithms driving content and recommendations, leading to disillusionment among users.
- Media: AI-native formats and generative creative tools lowering the barrier to creation and distribution across music, gaming, sports, and fashion.
Rivera observed that today’s founders operate differently from when he joined Snap nearly a decade ago:
- Leaner teams
- Faster launches with public iteration
- Diversifying monetization beyond ads into subscriptions, token-based models, usage-based pricing, and outcome-based revenue.
Meta’s launch of Forum this week underscores the shift, as it unbundles Facebook Groups into a standalone app designed to capture community discussion, a use case currently dominated by Reddit. This validates Ghost Angels’ thesis that niche community tools are the next category.