⛵Dhow Dispatch │ Our First Investment: Lore

Download the app. Join the community. Back the builders shaping our future.

Download Dhow - the community-powered private markets platform helping Muslim investors discover opportunities, learn, connect, and back Muslim founders building the future.

Our $10,000 allocation spots are now fully filled, and we expect to begin deploying capital shortly. Our first investment will be in the consumer AI space. The minimum commitment for new investors is now $25,000, with future access expected to become increasingly limited. Reserve allocation here.

Our thesis is simple:

This is Portfolio Company #1.

Here’s why we invested.

We launched Dhow Horizon Fund I to back Muslim-origin and values-aligned technology founders early, while the companies are still being shaped and the upside remains asymmetric.

The fund is targeting approximately 20 investments across a $5M portfolio, primarily at the seed stage.

That makes the first investment meaningful.

The first check establishes what kind of fund we intend to build.

For Portfolio Company #1, we wanted a founder with an unusual advantage, a product showing authentic pull, and a market where a relatively small company could become strategically important.

We found that in Lore.

Zehra Naqvi has been preparing to build Lore for much longer than Lore has existed.

As a teenager, she ran One Direction fan accounts that collectively reached roughly 230K followers. She spent years inside the Tumblr and Twitter fandom culture that shaped how an entire generation experienced entertainment online.

She later attended Columbia University, led founder community and growth at Republic, became a consumer investor at Headline Ventures, built The Z List, and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital. Forbes reported that The Z List reached 50K subscribers and a 10K-member community.

Her background provides a clear edge because Lore is being built around behavior Zehra understands natively.

She knows fandom as a fan.

She understands community through years spent building one.

Her investing background gives her a view into the mechanics of venture-scale consumer companies.

Lore came from those experiences converging around one observation: the internet has become increasingly fragmented for people who want to go deep.

Watch a great show and become obsessed with one character.

You might search Reddit. Then TikTok. Then a wiki. Then YouTube. Then Google. Maybe you end up reading a ten-year-old forum thread at 2:00 AM.

All of that behavior says something.

It reveals curiosity.

It shows emotional attachment.

It exposes confusion, theories, niche interests, forgotten characters, and the subjects people care enough about to spend hours investigating.

Lore is building a home for that behavior.

The product organizes internet rabbit holes around fandoms, stories, people, characters, and cultural interests. Users can explore connections and build a personalized graph around the things they care about.

Zehra has described the vision as a "Library of Alexandria for the fandom age."

That alone can make for a compelling consumer product.

Our interest goes further.

Every interaction also creates data.

This is where our thesis changes.

Lore can learn from behavior that conventional audience measurement struggles to observe directly:

What are people voluntarily researching?

How deep are they willing to go?

Which characters trigger disproportionate curiosity?

Which old pieces of IP suddenly start attracting attention again?

What questions keep appearing across thousands of users?

Those signals can become valuable far beyond the consumer application.

A studio deciding whether to revive a franchise has an intelligence problem.

A label evaluating an artist has one.

An agency deciding how to position talent has one.

A streaming giant deciding where to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars has one.

Lore has an opportunity to build a proprietary dataset around the demand that precedes some of those decisions.

That data compounds as the consumer network grows.

Lore began building demand before broadly releasing the product.

In September 2025, Zehra publicly disclosed that Lore had passed 100K people on its waitlist and 15K members in Discord while still in stealth.

When Lore announced its $1.1M pre-seed financing shortly after, TechCrunch reported an early product experiment with:

The round was led by Village Global, with participation from Precursor Ventures.

Lore has continued developing since those public snapshots.

Our diligence gave us a deeper look into how that engagement is evolving, and the underlying behavior was one of the strongest parts of our conviction.

We’ll leave the confidential numbers in the data room. But currently, they’re far more impressive than what’s currently public and written here.

A fandom product sounds niche until you look at the amount of capital moving through the industries built around fandom.

Ampere Analysis estimates global content investment will reach approximately $255B in 2026.

Streaming services alone are expected to deploy approximately $101B, representing roughly 40% of global content investment.

Every one of those dollars sits downstream from decisions about:

Lore does not need to capture a percentage of $255B for the thesis to work.

The relevant opportunity is the intelligence layer around those decisions.

For context, ESOMAR measured the broader global insights industry at roughly $142B in 2023, spanning market research, research software, analytics, social listening, communities, and reporting.

This is already an enormous industry built around one core need:

Companies will pay to understand consumers better.

Entertainment makes that need particularly valuable because a single decision can put hundreds of millions of dollars at risk.

The unit economics get interesting quickly if Lore becomes embedded in entertainment decision-making.

Consider the math conceptually:

100 enterprise customers × $250K annual spend = $25M ARR

At the upper end:

100 customers × $1M annual spend = $100M ARR

Expand that across studios, streamers, labels, agencies, production companies, gaming publishers, franchise owners, and other IP-heavy businesses and the path to venture-scale revenue becomes easier to see.

Those figures are illustrative scenarios rather than Lore guidance.

But the point is that Lore doesn’t need millions of enterprise customers.

A relatively small number of large organizations control enormous pools of content and marketing capital.

High-value intelligence sold into those organizations can support a substantial business.

Lore is entering a market with sophisticated incumbents.

Brandwatch, Meltwater, Talkwalker, and Sprinklr already help enterprises analyze social conversation and consumer sentiment.

Parrot Analytics is particularly relevant in entertainment. It sells audience demand, content valuation, talent intelligence, and related analytics directly to studios, streamers, agencies, investors, and production companies. Parrot says its systems analyze activity associated with more than 2 billion people each day across consumption data, search behavior, social activity, wikis, and other sources.

That makes Parrot a serious adjacent competitor.

It also helps validate the customer need.

Lore's wedge comes from building its own consumer experience around private exploration and subjective curiosity.

Traditional social listening starts with publicly observable conversation.

Entertainment analytics platforms aggregate existing consumption and internet signals.

Lore can generate first-party signals because users come directly to Lore to explore.

That distinction matters if the resulting data proves predictive (which, so far in Beta, it has)

Lore’s proprietary insights and data can be tapped into far more easily than the history of millions of user interactions scattered across the internet.

That’s the moat we’re underwriting.

Another reason we like the category is that data and consumer-intelligence businesses have repeatedly attracted strategic buyers.

A few relevant precedents:

Brandwatch → Cision | $450M

Cision acquired digital consumer intelligence and social-listening platform Brandwatch for $450M in 2021.

Gracenote → Nielsen | $560M

Nielsen acquired entertainment metadata and discovery platform Gracenote for $560M, specifically citing the value of its data, technology, audience engagement insights, and relationships across video, music, and sports.

Meltwater → Marlin + Altor | ~$585M Equity value

Media and consumer intelligence company Meltwater was taken private in 2023 in a transaction valuing its fully diluted share capital at approximately ~$585M.

Talkwalker → Hootsuite | Undisclosed

Hootsuite acquired AI-powered social-listening platform Talkwalker in 2024 as part of its push toward a broader consumer and social intelligence platform.

These companies aren’t direct Lore comps.

Bu they establish something more useful: strategic buyers have consistently paid for differentiated datasets, consumer intelligence, audience measurement, and tools that turn behavior into decisions.

Lore could eventually become relevant to several buyer categories:

A strategic acquisition is one path.

The more interesting outcome is Lore becoming large enough that selling is optional.

Our conviction ultimately comes back to a few underlying dynamics.

Founder-market fit is unusually strong.

Zehra has spent years inside fandom, community, consumer technology, and venture. Lore comes directly from that lived experience.

Distribution came before scale.

Lore built a six-figure waitlist and a large community before a broad product rollout.

The consumer behavior is valuable in itself.

People willingly spend time researching the things they love. Lore organizes that behavior and can potentially own the resulting data.

Enterprise buyers already spend heavily on intelligence.

The budgets exist. Lore's job is to create datasets valuable enough to earn part of them.

The data asset can compound.

Each new user can create more information about what communities care about. Historical depth becomes increasingly difficult to recreate.

There are several viable outcomes.

Lore can become a large consumer destination, an enterprise intelligence company, an underlying data platform, or some combination of the three.

That combination creates the kind of asymmetry we want at the seed stage.

Dhow Horizon Fund I exists because we believe there is extraordinary founder talent inside our community that deserves serious early-stage capital.

We also believe our investors & community deserve exposure to companies capable of producing true venture outcomes.

Lore represents both sides of that mission.

Zehra is a Muslim-origin founder building for a global market.

The company has nothing inherently "Muslim" about the product.

To us - that’s important.

Our thesis has always been broader than building another collection of community-specific apps.

We want to back exceptional founders building exceptional products in exceptional markets.

Lore is exactly what that looks like.

A year ago, Dhow Horizon Fund I was a thesis.

Today, it owns a piece of its first company.

Lore is Portfolio Company #1.

We are backing Zehra because we believe fandom is producing a valuable new behavioral dataset, Lore has a credible mechanism to capture it, and enormous pools of entertainment capital sit downstream from better audience intelligence.

If Lore works, it can become much larger than a place to explore fandom.

It can become part of the infrastructure that tells the entertainment industry what people care about before everyone else figures it out.

That is a bet we're excited to make.

Welcome to the portfolio, Lore.

Inshallah, this is the first of many.

Explore Lore →
[LORE]

Learn more about Dhow Horizon Fund I →
[HORIZON FUND I]

Interested in investing alongside us?

Reply "Horizon" to this email.

And if you know someone who would enjoy Dhow Dispatch, send this issue their way.

Every country has different employment laws, payroll requirements, notice periods, and benefits expectations.

Oyster's Global Hiring Guides help you navigate the details, avoid surprises, and hire with confidence—wherever you're growing next.

Get the country guides

If you enjoyed this, you’d be doing us a HUGE FAVOR by just clicking the ad above & below - we appreciate it!

Wispr Flow turns your voice into clean, professional text inside any app. Emails, Slack, client updates — speak once, send without editing. 4x faster than typing.

Try Wispr Flow free

Sources

_{Company-specific information discussed during Dhow's investment diligence may include nonpublic information. This issue intentionally uses public figures unless otherwise stated.}