Meet 22 VCs on the hunt for the next breakout startup in social media

Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok have dominated the social media landscape for years.

As AI infiltrates every platform — and many corners of our lives — new social media founders, apps, and internet behaviors are emerging.

From vibe coding to cultural shifts shaping how people want to connect, it’s a perfect storm for founders to experiment with social media.

AI has “essentially brought down the cost of making anything,” Amy Wu Martin, a partner at Menlo Ventures, told Business Insider.

Menlo is an investor in Anthropic, whose product Claude Code has radically changed the product-building pipeline for startups. “If you want to build a consumer AI company, you may not need a lot of engineers, but you still need cash for Anthropic credits,” said Vanessa Larco, who cofounded Premise, a new VC firm backing AI-native startups.

While it’s easier than ever to make an app out of thin air, it’s difficult to raise venture capital for a consumer-facing social media upstart.

PitchBook data on social startup investments shows that after a peak in 2021 (239 deals totaling $2.2 billion), the number of deals has declined each year.

In 2025, PitchBook counted 97 deals totaling $330 million.

Still, there’s a cohort of investors with hungry eyes searching for what will stick.

Business Insider is highlighting investors at 22 VC firms that are actively funding or scouting out innovative social startups.

Our third annual list is sourced from nominations by startup founders and venture peers, as well as our own reporting.

These investors, across the board, are excited by what AI has unlocked for the category, and many are bullish on consumer investments even as the broader VC space shies away from it.

Our list includes big-shot firms that backed many of the mobile-era giants, as well as AI-era funds founded by VCs who wanted to take things into their own hands.

They’re backing startups building agentic solutions for our personal relationships, companies focused on getting us off our phones and into real life, and vibe-coding startups turning software into content.

As Nicole Quinn — a former investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners who left in 2025 to cofound Connect Ventures — put it, funding this next wave of internet startups will largely be investing in the “future of joy.”