The funding round was led by Lumikai, India's first interactive media, digital platforms, and games-focused VC fund. Lumikai invested USD500K through Pixels, its pre-seed programme 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.
The premise behind Demoverse is to allow consumers to help shape products before brands commit to production. Brands post a product concept or design direction on the platform, together with guidelines specifying what can and cannot be changed. Consumers then use AI to reshape and refine the concept, while the wider community evaluates and votes on the strongest directions.
The process is designed to give brands a product direction and demand signal before production begins. Consumers whose ideas contribute to the winning design also earn royalties when the product is commercialised, giving contributors a financial stake in the resulting product.
Demoverse describes the model as a move from User Generated Content (UGC) to User Generated Products (UGP), positioning consumers as participants in product creation rather than only audiences for finished products.
The company was founded by Akshay Mehta, whose experience helping construct the UAE's first commercial-scale satellite manufacturing facility prompted him to consider whether AI could make product creation accessible to a much larger group of people. Before founding Demoverse, Mehta 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."
Demoverse is initially focusing on fashion, where consumers tend to have strong opinions on design and visual identity. The company plans to extend the model into beauty, CPG and other consumer categories over time. It has already conducted early trials with Indian consumer brands and will use the newly raised capital to convert those early partnerships into paid campaigns, build out its US go-to-market and grow its consumer creator community.
For Lumikai, the investment extends its thesis around interactive consumer platforms. The firm said that 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."
The funding will support Demoverse as it moves its early brand partnerships towards paid campaigns, expands its US go-to-market strategy and grows its consumer creator community.
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, while 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 www.demoverse.ai.
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, its pre-seed program for founders in their -1 to 10 journey of building the next generation of interactive platforms. For more information, visit www.lumikai.com.
About The Author
Comment List