Lumikai Leads $600K Pre-Seed Round in Demoverse, an AI Platform Turning Consumers into Product Co-Creators
Bengaluru-based AI-powered product co-creation startup Demoverse has raised $600,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Lumikai, India's first interactive media, digital platforms, and games-focused VC fund, with UAE-based deep-tech investor-operator Marlan and a group of angel investors also participating.
Here's what Demoverse is actually building. Instead of using consumers only as a feedback mechanism after a product has already been developed, the platform lets brands post a product concept or design direction, define exactly what elements consumers can and cannot change, and then let communities use AI-powered design tools to reshape and refine those concepts themselves. The wider community then evaluates and votes on the submissions, and contributors to winning products even earn royalties. Founder Akshay Mehta frames this as the shift from User Generated Content to User Generated Products, consumers won't just create content around brands anymore, they'll help create the actual products.
The problem this solves is a genuinely expensive one. Consumer brands have spent decades trying to predict what people will buy, and getting that prediction wrong carries a real cost, McKinsey and the Business of Fashion estimate the fashion industry alone produced between $70 billion and $140 billion worth of excess inventory in 2023. Demoverse is betting that giving consumers the tools to actually shape a product before it gets made is a stronger demand signal than any survey or trend report.
The investment thesis behind this deal is worth noting. Lumikai's $500,000 came through its Pixels programme, built specifically for founders working on next-generation interactive platforms, and the firm's founder Salone Sehgal framed the bet around a simple insight, AI is making it possible to create an almost infinite number of products, but infinite supply doesn't solve the real problem of figuring out what people actually want.
The traction and roadmap both look promising. Demoverse, founded earlier this year and already part of the NVIDIA Inception program, has run around seven closed trials with Indian consumer brands. The fresh capital will go toward converting those early partnerships into paid campaigns, building out its consumer-facing application, expanding its design community, and pushing into the US market, starting in fashion before expanding across other consumer categories like beauty, interior design and automobiles.
From passive audiences to active co-creators, Demoverse's pre-seed round is a bet that AI's next big shift in retail isn't about making more products, it's about knowing which ones to make in the first place.
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— Sandeep Raiza