A former venture capitalist who built a 250K-strong following analyzing Marvel movies and One Direction is now building the search engine she wished existed during her fangirl days. Lore just raised $1.1 million to create a personalized discovery platform for internet obsessions, emerging from stealth next week.
Lore is betting that the internet's most passionate users - the ones who spend hours dissecting Marvel theories or tracking K-pop comebacks - deserve better tools than scattered Reddit threads and fragmented Twitter discussions. The fandom-focused search platform just closed a $1.1 million pre-seed round, with plans to emerge from stealth October 6th.
Founder Zehra Naqvi knows this audience intimately. The 26-year-old built her reputation as a obsessive fangirl in the 2010s Tumblr era, staying up nights analyzing One Direction movements and Marvel release patterns. That dedication earned her 250,000 collective followers across platforms. "Those early internet rabbit holes taught me how magical it felt to not just consume culture but to contribute to it," Naqvi told TechCrunch.
After starting a company at 12, studying art history at Columbia, and becoming a consumer investor at Headline Ventures, Naqvi realized something was missing from today's internet landscape. Despite spending over 500 hours researching Marvel movies across 17 years, no platform tracked her consumption journey or connected those obsessions meaningfully.
"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, describing the moment that sparked Lore's creation.
The platform promises to build personalized graphs of user obsessions, surfacing fan theories, interpretations, cultural context, and easter eggs in an interconnected web. Unlike traditional search engines or social platforms, Lore focuses on deep discovery rather than quick consumption. "You can zoom in on a single theory or zoom out and see how all your fandoms connect," Naqvi explained. "It's like playing with knowledge instead of just consuming it."
Early metrics suggest strong product-market fit. A recent experiment generated over 1,000 logins and nearly 24,000 searches, with users collectively spending eight days - about 200 hours straight - diving into obsessions. "That level of engagement is kind of insane and proves the need for what we are building," Naqvi said.
The timing feels right for a fandom-first platform. Naqvi argues that traditional social media has become increasingly fragmented and dopamine-driven, making "joy spiraling" harder to find. "There are plenty of places to yap," she said, noting how much of social media aims for quick hits rather than deep engagement. "The next version of social media will be quieter, more human, and built around passion and memory."
Village Global led the funding 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 remains secretive about the underlying technology, calling it "our special sauce." She declined to share product imagery, saying Lore's official hard launch isn't until next year. But she's already made two key hires - a marketing executive and an engineer - and described her fundraising process as characteristically "obsessive."
The competitive landscape includes AI search engines like Perplexity, community platforms like Reddit, and knowledge bases like Wikipedia. But Naqvi argues none were built with fandom culture in mind. "We are building a lurker-first space," she said, describing Lore as "interactive, colorful, and designed for play."
The fresh capital will fund user acquisition and continued product testing as Lore aims to restore joy to internet discovery. Naqvi hopes to create a space where obsession isn't embarrassing but sacred - what she calls "our attempt to rebuild the Library of Alexandria for the fandom age."
"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."
Lore represents a fascinating bet on depth over breadth in an increasingly surface-level internet. By focusing specifically on fandom culture - a massive but underserved market - Naqvi is building the tools she wished existed during her own obsessive fan days. With Village Global's backing and early engagement metrics showing 200+ hours of deep user sessions, Lore could tap into the same passion that built communities around everything from Harry Potter to K-pop. The real test will be whether the platform can maintain that intimate, rabbit-hole feeling while scaling beyond its initial cohort of super-fans.
