Snap alumni launch Ghost Angels fund for AI startups

A group of 20 Snap alumni has launched Ghost Angels, a new venture fund focused on backing early-stage startups. The fund targets pre-seed and seed rounds—which represent the earliest stages of startup funding—specifically for artificial intelligence startups building in the social media and consumer sectors. Ghost Angels has already backed at least five companies. Within the next year, the fund plans to deploy capital into at least 15 companies as it seeks to back the next generation of social media.

Max Rivera started the fund in 2025 to formalize an existing angel-investing community of Snap alumni. Rivera, who spent nearly 10 years at Snap and once led global partnerships there, currently works at Microsoft’s AI division. While Rivera runs the fund, the group includes around 20 other founder members and investors, such as Alexandra Levitt, who ran Snap’s corporate accelerator, and Will Wu, a founding member of Snap’s product and design team. Rivera noted that the group was intentional about mixing senior executives with professionals earlier in their careers to bring a diversity of thought and experience to evaluating deals and supporting founders.

The fund is investing during a period of structural change in consumer technology. Rivera observed that the traditional concept of social media has split into separate social and media components. Traditional platforms rely heavily on advertisements and algorithmic recommendations, which has left many users disillusioned relative to the original promise of connecting people. Ghost Angels plans to back founders applying AI to deliver on that original social promise, while on the media side, it targets AI-native formats and generative creative tools that lower the barriers to creation and distribution. Additionally, Rivera noted that founders are launching quickly, iterating in public, and prioritizing founder-led go-to-market strategies. They are also experimenting with monetization models beyond advertising, including subscriptions, token-based, usage-based, or outcome-based systems.

Among the fund’s initial investments is Mozi. Molly DeWolf Swenson, co-founder and CEO of Mozi, a portfolio company of Ghost Angels, said, “Snap alumni network is full of brilliant, influential people who inherently understand the problem space I’m playing in.”

Why it matters

Ghost Angels represents a trend of experienced operator-investors leveraging specific platform-alumni networks to identify and fund the next generation of AI-native social and consumer applications.