20 Snap Alumni Launch Angel Fund for Social Media’s Next Era

Twenty former Snap employees have come together to launch Ghost Angels, a new angel fund focused on backing AI startups that are reimagining social media beyond the traditional ad-driven model. The fund has already completed five investments and plans to deploy its remaining capital into at least 15 more companies over the next year, though it has not disclosed its total fund size.

Max Rivera, who previously led global partnerships at Snap and now works in Microsoft’s AI division, founded Ghost Angels in 2025 to formalize an already active alumni angel network. The roughly 20 founding members include Alexandra Levitt, former head of 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.” The group spans former senior executives, early-career professionals, and a few current Snap employees.

Ghost Angels invests at the pre-seed to seed stage in AI startups operating in social media and consumer spaces. Rivera notes a key trend: “social” and “media” are diverging into two distinct categories. Today’s social media platforms rely heavily on ads and algorithm-driven content, but many users are growing disillusioned. “A lot of people are disillusioned with that relative to the original promise of connecting people in your life,” Rivera said. The next wave is moving away from generalized platforms and toward niche communities.

The fund backs both sides of this split. On the social side, founders are using AI to restore the original goal of genuine human connection. On the media side, AI-native formats and generative creative tools are lowering barriers to content creation and distribution across music, gaming, sports, and fashion.

Rivera observes that today’s founders operate differently than when he joined Snap nearly a decade ago. Teams are leaner, launches are faster, and monetization is diversifying beyond ads into subscriptions, token-based models, usage-based pricing, and outcome-based revenue.

Meta’s recent launch of Forum, a standalone app built from Facebook Groups, underscores how incumbents are sensing the same shift. Forum targets the community discussion space currently dominated by Reddit. That Meta is unbundling Groups into a separate app validates Ghost Angels’ thesis that niche community tools are the next big category.

Molly DeWolf Swenson, co-founder and CEO of portfolio company Mozi, said the “Snap alumni network is full of brilliant, influential people who inherently understand the problem space I’m playing in.” For founders, the fund’s value extends beyond capital to domain expertise from people who helped build one of the defining social platforms of the last decade.

The broader startup landscape is rewarding AI-native approaches that build for new categories rather than optimizing existing ones. Peec AI hit $10 million ARR in six months by targeting generative engine optimization, a category that barely existed before ChatGPT changed search behavior. Ghost Angels is betting the same applies to social: winning platforms will be built for AI-native interaction, not retrofitted with AI features.

The Snap alumni network remains one of the most active in consumer tech. Snapchat’s culture of experimentation, its bet on ephemeral content, early investment in AR, and willingness to build products that seemed strange before they became obvious produced a generation of product thinkers now spotting the next cycle. Ghost Angels is the vehicle for putting that conviction to work.