Former Snap Employees Launch New Fund to Back Early-Stage Social Media Startups

A group of 20 former Snap employees and executives launched Ghost Angels, an investment fund backing early-stage startups building new kinds of social media and consumer apps. The fund, created in 2025 by Max Rivera—who previously managed partnerships at Snap and now works in AI at Microsoft—has already invested in five companies and plans to fund at least 15 more over the next year. The fund's exact size has not been disclosed.

Ghost Angels brings together former Snap leadership and employees, including Alexandra Levitt, who ran Snap's startup accelerator program, and Will Wu, an early member of Snap's product and design team. This mix gives portfolio companies access to both strategic guidance from senior leaders and hands-on technical knowledge from engineers and designers who built Snap's core features.

What Ghost Angels Is Looking For

Rivera's core idea is that users increasingly want genuine human connection over platforms designed primarily to show advertisements and push engagement metrics. He sees an opportunity in startups that move away from traditional social feeds and algorithmic content distribution—the standard model used by Facebook, Instagram, and similar platforms.

His investment strategy reflects a belief that "social" and "media" are becoming separate things. Rather than building one-size-fits-all platforms optimized for ad revenue, new startups might focus on direct messaging, community-building tools, or novel ways for people to create and share content together.

Experience as Advantage

Ghost Angels deliberately mixed executives with more junior engineers and product managers. This structure means portfolio companies get both high-level strategy from former Snap leaders and practical insights from people who scaled Snap's real-time messaging, location features, and photo-sharing technology.

The fund focuses on startups using artificial intelligence—machine learning algorithms that learn from data—as a core part of their product. This positions Ghost Angels at the intersection of AI capabilities and how people actually want to interact with each other on digital platforms. Investing at the pre-seed and seed stage (very early in a company's life) means Ghost Angels can work with founders before their product has found product-market fit, while tapping the collective expertise of people who have scaled Snap from startup to publicly traded company.

The Broader Picture

We have seen a similar pattern before in the technology industry: successful platform companies eventually generate their own venture funds as alumni networks mature. Google's early employees created funds focused on search and advertising tools. Facebook alumni backed social commerce startups. Twitter veterans invested in real-time communication platforms. Ghost Angels follows this playbook, but with a particular focus on AI.

The timing matters. In previous waves of social media innovation, new ideas mostly involved better user interfaces or new formats for sharing content—think Stories or live video. Today, opportunities center on how machine learning can fundamentally change the way platforms understand and help people connect. Ghost Angels is betting that people who built large-scale social platforms at Snap can recognize these shifts and back startups that capitalize on them.

The broader context here is worth flagging: traditional social media platforms are under pressure from regulation and user dissatisfaction. At the same time, AI tools are making new kinds of interaction and collaboration technically possible. Ghost Angels positions itself at this intersection, backing startups that might define what social media looks like in the next decade.

How AI Fits In

Rivera's point about the separation of "social" from "media" reflects changes in user behavior that accelerated during the pandemic and have intensified as AI tools spread. Most traditional social media platforms measure success by how much time users spend on them or how much they engage with posts—metrics that often reward sensational or divisive content over meaningful conversation. This creates room for startups measuring success differently: by relationship depth, community strength, or collaborative creation.

Ghost Angels focuses on startups that integrate machine learning into social tools—not just for recommending content, but for introducing users to each other, moderating conversations, enabling new creative collaborations, or personalizing how people interact. Snap's background building augmented reality features, disappearing messages, and location-based tools gives Ghost Angels members practical knowledge of how people actually adopt complex social technologies.

What Ghost Angels Offers

Beyond money, Ghost Angels gives portfolio companies access to expertise in user acquisition, retention, content moderation at scale, and building sustainable business models that do not alienate users. The fund's members understand the technical challenges of real-time social features, handling user-generated content, and scaling recommendation systems.

Because the fund includes current Snap employees, there is potential for portfolio companies to partner with Snap itself—though Ghost Angels operates as an independent fund. This structure allows for strategic relationships without the conflicts of interest that might limit how freely the fund can invest.

The Road Ahead

Rivera brings a valuable combination of experience: he understands how Snap built its user base and managed partnerships, and he also understands cutting-edge AI infrastructure from his work at Microsoft. This gives Ghost Angels a lens on both how consumers actually adopt technology and what machine learning can technically enable. The fund's plan to back 15 additional startups over the next year suggests a healthy pipeline and confidence in the opportunity ahead.

As traditional social media companies face regulatory pressure and growing user fatigue with their business models, Ghost Angels is positioning itself to identify and fund the startups that might be their successors.