Zehra Naqvi, 26, grew up as an obsessive fangirl in the 2010s.
This was the time of Tumblr and Twitter. She gets up all night, breaking Marvel movie release dates and analyzing the movements of One Direction members. She eventually gained 250,000 followers on two platforms. “These early internet rabbit holes taught me how magical it felt to contribute to culture, not only to consume it,” she told TechCrunch.
She founded the company at the age of 12, studied art history in Colombia, and later became a consumer investor at Headline Ventures. (She also writes the popular consumer newsletter The Z List.)
Now she's starting something new. It is a search platform for people to study and discover internet obsessions. The company has already raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funds. It is set to appear from stealth on October 6th.
It was a few months ago that she quit her job with the headline and decided to go back first. She recalls her early days spiraling through the rabbit holes on the internet, and is disappointed when she realizes that all the research she spent hours in pursuit of joy is gone. “I've probably spent more than 500 hours reading about Marvel movies over 17 years and there's no single platform tracking my consumption,” she said.
Lore provided the tools he hoped “it existed when fandom felt like home before the internet was broken and joyless.” Consumers can go down the rabbit hole and provide links to fan theory, interpretation, cultural context, and Easter eggs. According to Naqvi, it builds a personalized graph of obsessions. Feed fandom and stun updates to surface. And they always provide users with monthly reports on what their obsession is.
“You can zoom in or zoom out on a single theory and see how all the fandoms connect,” Naqvi said. “It's like playing with knowledge, not just consuming it.”
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Naqvi is a mom for now about how the product works. She also refused to share any images, saying that Lore's official hard launch will not be until next year. “It's our special source,” she said of the technology powered by its products.
But she said rapid fandom consumption has not actually changed online, even when new social media channels are pop-ups. “If anything, fandom is more fragmented than ever, and as you get older, Joy Spiral becomes more difficult to find time,” she said. As an investor, she began to realize that she probably didn't need any more social tools for her fans.
“YAP has a lot of places,” she said, adding that much of the social media these days is aiming to feed into a quick dopamine hit, doom crawl, or “iPad Kid Behavior.” The next version of social media will be quiet, she said, more people and built around passion and memory.
“Love is an attempt to rebuild the Alexandria Library for its fandom era.”
NAQVI is the founder of Solo and has already won the first two recruits. Marketing Executive and Engineer. She described her fundraising process as “obsessiveness.” Village Global led the round with participation from Precursor Ventures.
“Lore is building the products that fandom has been waiting for,” Charles Hudson, managing partner at Precursor Ventures, told TechCrunch. “We imagine it as an important app for fandom to gather, share and deepen their involvement with what they love.”
Naqvi said fresh capital will be used to attract more users and continue to run product testing.
“We've put together experiments that have included over 1,000 logins, nearly 24,000 searches, and eight days of group, or roughly 200 hours of straight spirals into obsession,” she said. “That level of engagement is kind of insane and it proves the need for what we're building.”
Lore is not without competition. In the age of AI search engines, people are drawing confusion and comparisons, but she said others are noting that they offer the same features as Reddit and Wikipedia. “But none of these spaces were built with fandom in mind,” she said.
“We're building a Raakha First Space,” she continued, explaining “an interactive, colorful, designed for play.” She hopes that lore will restore some joy to the internet and create a sacred place where obsessions are not ashamed of.
“Consumer AI doesn't always have to be a shopping or glory assistant or an agent supporting another social app,” she said. “There are so many original and joyful ways to apply it. Lore is proof of that.”