Lumikai Leads $600K Pre-Seed Round in Demoverse, An AI Platform Turning Consumers Into Product Co-Creators

• Demoverse is an AI co-creation platform where brands build products with consumers, not just for them.
• The company calls this shift the move from User Generated Content to User Generated Products, UGC to UGP.
• The platform allows consumers to reshape brand concepts using AI, with the community voting on the strongest directions before brands commit to production.
• Founder Akshay Mehta helped build the UAE's first commercial-scale satellite manufacturing facility, an experience that left him asking whether AI could open product creation to a much larger group of people.
• The capital raised will be used to convert early brand partnerships into paid campaigns, build out Demoverse's US go to market, and grow the consumer creator community.

Demoverse, an AI powered co-creation platform that enables brands to build products directly with consumers, announced it has raised $600K in a pre-seed funding round. The round was led by Lumikai, India's first interactive media, digital platforms, and games focused VC fund. Lumikai invested $500K as part of Pixels, its pre-seed program for founders building the next generation of interactive platforms. The round also saw participation from Marlan, the UAE based investor-operator focused on deep-tech, and a group of angel investors.

Consumer brands have spent decades trying to predict what people will buy. Getting that prediction wrong is expensive. McKinsey and BoF estimate that the fashion industry alone produced between $70 billion and $140 billion worth of excess inventory in 2023, a pattern that is visible across consumer brands.

The point behind Demoverse is simple: make something people want, with consumers shaping the design before brands commit to production.

Brands post a product concept or design direction on the platform, along with guidelines for what can and cannot change. Consumers then use AI to reshape and refine the concept, and the wider community evaluates and votes on the strongest directions.

What comes back is a clear product direction and a demand signal, ahead of any production commitment. Consumers whose ideas shape the winning design also earn royalties when the product is commercialised, giving the community a genuine stake in the outcome.

Demoverse describes this shift as moving consumer participation from User Generated Content (UGC) to User Generated Products (UGP).

Founded by Akshay Mehta, Demoverse builds on his experience helping construct the UAE's first commercial scale satellite manufacturing facility, work that left him asking whether AI could open product creation to a much larger group of people. Before founding Demoverse, he spent eight years across investing, consulting and operating roles, including Bain, Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India), Asia Alternatives and the UAE’s Royal Group's deep tech investment platform.

Akshay Mehta, Founder of Demoverse, said: "Two decades of social media have trained people to form and express opinions on everything they see. Two years of AI have given the masses the ability to express what they want in a visual format. We have a golden opportunity to bring these trends together and open the canvas where people design and build the products they use, and benefit from their commercial success."

The company is starting in fashion, where consumers tend to have strong opinions on design and visual identity, and plans to extend the model into beauty, CPG and other consumer categories over time. It has already run early trials with Indian consumer brands and is using this round to convert those early partnerships into paid campaigns as it builds towards its next phase of growth.

For Lumikai, the investment extends its thesis around interactive consumer platforms: as AI increases the ease and reduces the cost of creation, consumers will increasingly move from passive audiences to active participants in what gets created.

Salone Sehgal, Founder and Managing Partner at Lumikai, said: "AI is going to make it possible to create an almost infinite number of products. But infinite supply doesn’t solve the fundamental problem: what do people actually want? Demoverse closes that loop. Instead of asking consumers what they might buy through a survey or trend report, it gives them the tools to actually shape the product before it gets made.

We believe the next evolution of UGC is UGP: User Generated Products. Consumers won’t just create the content around brands. Increasingly, they will participate in creating the products themselves. Akshay saw this shift early, and we’re excited to partner with him as he builds it.”

About Demoverse

Demoverse is an AI powered co-creation platform that lets consumer brands build products with their customers, not just for them. Consumers create, refine and vote on designs using AI within brand guidelines, and contributors to winning products earn royalties. The company is starting in fashion and plans to expand across consumer categories. Demoverse is part of the NVIDIA Inception program. For more information, visit: https://demoverse.ai/.

About Lumikai

Lumikai is India’s specialist VC firm focused on interactive media, digital platforms and games. The fund invests in early-stage founders building across original IP, games, digital media, immersive platforms, and frontier tech. The firm has backed category leading companies including EloTV, Story TV and Master AI (India’s #1 social entertainment, micro-drama and edutainment platform) Supernova and Superflow (#1 educational app in India, building an AI communication OS), AutoVRse (India’s fastest-growing enterprise VR company), among many others. A seed stage investor, it also runs Lumikai Pixels, itspre-seed program for founders in their -1 to 10 journey of building the next generation of interactive platforms. For more information, visit https://www.lumikai.com/.