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.

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 commercialized, 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 says, "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."

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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 says, "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.”