Zehra Naqvi, 26, grew up as an obsessive fan girl in the 2010s.
This was the era of Tumblr and Twitter. She would stay up all night breaking down the release dates of Marvel movies or analyzing the movements of One Direction members. She eventually gained a collective 250,000 followers across the two platforms. “Those early internet rabbit holes taught me how magical it felt to not just consume culture but to contribute to it,” she told TechCrunch.
She went on to start a company at 12, study art history at Columbia, and then became a consumer investor at Headline Ventures. (She also writes the popular consumer newsletter The Z List.)
Now, she’s starting something new: Lore, a search platform for people to research and discover internet obsessions. The company has already raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding. It is set to emerge from stealth on October 6.
It was a few months ago that she quit her job at Headline and decided to go back to the beginning. She recalled those early days of spiraling down internet rabbit holes and became dismayed when she realized that all that research she spent hours in the pleasure pursuit of was gone. “How is it possible that I’ve spent probably well over 500 hours reading about Marvel movies over 17 years and no single platform tracks my consumption,” she said.
Lore provides the tools she wished “had existed when fandom felt like home before the internet became fractured and joyless,” she said. It lets consumers go down rabbit holes, providing links to fan theories, interpretations, cultural context, and easter eggs. According to Naqvi, it builds a personalized graph of obsessions; surfaces fandom and stan updates in a feed; and gives monthly reports to users about what their obsessions are at any given time.
“You can zoom in on a single theory or zoom out and see how all your fandoms connect,” Naqvi said. “It’s like playing with knowledge instead of just consuming it.”
Naqvi is mum for now on how the product works. She also declined to share any imagery, saying that Lore’s official hard launch isn’t until next year. “It’s our special sauce,” she said of the technology powering the product.
She did say, however, that rapid fandom consumption hasn’t really changed online, even though new social media channels have popped up for users to interact. “If anything, fandom is more fragmented than ever, and as you get older, joy spiraling becomes harder to find time for,” she said. As an investor, she began to realize that perhaps there didn’t need to be any more social tools for fans.
“There are plenty of places to yap,” she said, adding that so much of social media these days aims for quick dopamine hits, doomscrolling, or feeds into “iPad kid behavior.” The next version of social media will be quieter, she said, more human, and built around passion and memory.
“Lore is our attempt to rebuild the Library of Alexandria for the fandom age.”
Naqvi is a solo founder and has already made her first two hires: a marketing executive and an engineer. She described her fundraising process as “obsessive.” Village Global led the round with participation from Precursor Ventures.
“Lore is building the product fandoms have been waiting for,” Charles Hudson, managing partner at Precursor Ventures, told TechCrunch. “We envision it as the essential app for fandoms to gather, share, and deepen their engagement with the things they love.”
Naqvi said the fresh capital will be used to attract more users and continue running product testing.
“We wrapped up an experiment with over 1,000 logins, nearly 24,000 searches, and a collective eight days, or about 200 hours straight of spiraling deep into obsessions,” she said. “That level of engagement is kind of insane and proves the need for what we are building.”
Lore is not without competition. In the age of AI search engines, she said, people have drawn comparisons to Perplexity, while others note it provides the same function as Reddit or Wikipedia. “But none of these spaces were built with fandom in mind,” she said.
“We are building a lurker-first space,” she continued, describing Lore as “interactive, colorful, and designed for play. She hopes Lore will restore some joy to the internet and create a place where obsession is not embarrassing, but sacred.
“Consumer AI doesn’t always have to be an agent that helps you shop or a glorified assistant or another social app,” she said. “There are so many more inventive and joy-first ways to apply it, and Lore is proving that.”