Former Snap Leaders Start Investment Fund for New Social Media Startups

A group of 20 former Snap executives and engineers have launched Ghost Angels, an investment fund that backs early-stage startups building new kinds of social media and consumer apps. The fund, started in 2025 by Max Rivera—who previously led partnerships at Snap and now works at Microsoft—has already invested in five companies. The team plans to fund at least 15 more within the next year. The fund did not disclose how much money it has to invest.

The group includes current Snap employees and former leaders like Alexandra Levitt, who ran Snap's startup accelerator program, and Will Wu, a founding member of Snap's product design team.

What Ghost Angels Is Looking For

Rivera's main idea is simple: he thinks social media is changing. Instead of apps built to show you ads and keep you scrolling, he believes users want platforms that help them connect with real people.

The fund focuses on startups that build tools for genuine human connection rather than platforms designed around ads and recommendation algorithms. Rivera notes that what we call "social" (connecting with people) and what we call "media" (content to watch or read) are starting to split into separate things. This means opportunities exist for startups that help people talk directly to each other, or create new ways to make and share content that go beyond the typical feed on your screen.

Why These Former Snap Employees Matter

Ghost Angels is structured with both senior leaders and younger engineers and designers—people who actually built Snap's features. This mix lets the startups they invest in get two kinds of help: high-level strategy advice from people who ran Snap, plus practical technical guidance from people who built it.

The fund's focus on artificial intelligence and social startups is strategic. It targets companies at the stage where they still have early users and are testing ideas, not yet companies that have figured out their path to success. The investors have the advantage of having built Snap from a startup into a large public company—knowledge that is hard to come by.

A Pattern We've Seen Before

This is not the first time successful tech companies have spawned investment funds. After Google grew large, some of its early employees started funds to back search and ad technology companies. Facebook alumni backed social commerce startups. Twitter veterans invested in real-time communication tools.

What is different now is the timing. In earlier waves of social media, new ideas often meant new designs or new types of content. Today, artificial intelligence is changing the fundamentals of how platforms can understand people and connect them to each other. Ghost Angels is betting on startups that can harness AI in ways that build stronger human relationships, not just keep people on the app longer.

What's Driving This Opportunity

The way people use social media has shifted, especially since the pandemic and as AI tools have become common. Many traditional social media platforms are designed to prioritize content that gets big reactions—lots of likes, comments, shares—rather than content that leads to real connection. This creates an opening for startups building apps that measure success differently: by how deep friendships get, how strong communities become, or how much people actually create together.

Machine learning—software that learns patterns from data—could help new platforms do things traditional social media cannot. AI might introduce you to people you should meet, help moderate conversations fairly, let people collaborate on creative projects in new ways, or adapt the experience to how each person likes to interact.

Snap has real experience building these kinds of complex features: its original ephemeral messaging, its AR camera effects, and its location-based tools all required deep thinking about how people actually use apps. The Ghost Angels investors understand this history.

What Ghost Angels Gives Its Startups

Beyond money, Ghost Angels offers startups access to knowledge about how to get users, how to keep them engaged, how to manage millions of pieces of user-created content, and how to make money without ruining the user experience. Current Snap employees on the fund also create potential partnerships with Snap itself, though Ghost Angels operates as its own independent fund.

The fund can invest where it sees opportunity without worrying about conflicts of interest with Snap's own business strategy.

What This Means

Ghost Angels is launching at a moment when social media platforms are under pressure. Users are tired of endless ads and algorithmic feeds. Governments are scrutinizing what these platforms do. At the same time, AI is creating genuine new possibilities for how people could interact online.

Rivera's background—he has worked on both Snap's relationships with partners and on Microsoft's AI capabilities—gives him a useful vantage point. The fund can think about both how regular people will want to use new social tools and what cutting-edge AI can actually do. That combination is worth watching. As the big social media companies struggle with regulation and user frustration, Ghost Angels is backing the startups that might build what comes next.