Pune: Demoverse, an AI-powered co-creation platform that enables brands to build products directly with consumers, has raised $600K in a pre-seed funding round led by Lumikai, India’s first interactive media, digital platforms, and games-focused venture capital fund.
Lumikai invested $500K in the round through Pixels, its pre-seed program for founders building the next generation of interactive platforms.
The round also saw participation from Marlan, a UAE-based investor-operator focused on deep-tech, along with a group of angel investors.
Demoverse enables brands to develop products with consumers rather than simply creating products for them. The company describes this shift as a move from User Generated Content (UGC) to User Generated Products (UGP).
The Demoverse platform allows consumers to use AI to reshape brand concepts, while the wider community evaluates and votes on the strongest product directions before brands commit to production.
Demoverse Aims to Connect Consumer Demand With Product Creation
Consumer brands have spent decades trying to predict what people will buy.
Getting those predictions wrong can be 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 premise behind Demoverse is to make products that people want by involving consumers in the design process before brands commit to production.
Brands post a product concept or design direction on the Demoverse platform, along with guidelines outlining what can and cannot be changed. Consumers can then use AI to reshape and refine the concept.
The wider community evaluates and votes on the strongest directions. This provides brands with a product direction and a demand signal before production begins.
Consumers whose ideas contribute to the winning design also earn royalties when the product is commercialised, giving the community a stake in the outcome.
Demoverse describes the model as a transition from User Generated Content (UGC) to User Generated Products (UGP), with consumers moving beyond creating content around brands to participating directly in product creation.
Akshay Mehta’s Vision for Demoverse
Demoverse was founded by Akshay Mehta, whose experience includes helping construct the UAE’s first commercial-scale satellite manufacturing facility.
The experience led 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 at 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.”
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Demoverse Starts With Fashion
Demoverse is initially focusing on fashion, where consumers tend to have strong opinions about design and visual identity. The company plans to extend its model into beauty, CPG and other consumer categories over time.
The company has already conducted early trials with Indian consumer brands. The newly raised capital will be used to convert these early brand partnerships into paid campaigns, build out Demoverse’s US go-to-market strategy and expand its consumer creator community.
The funding will support Demoverse as it moves from early brand trials towards its next phase of growth.
Lumikai Expands Interactive Consumer Platform Thesis
For Lumikai, the investment in Demoverse extends its thesis around interactive consumer platforms.
The firm believes that as AI makes creation easier and reduces its cost, 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 $600K pre-seed round gives Demoverse capital to advance its brand partnerships, expand into the US market and grow its consumer creator community as it develops its AI-powered product co-creation model.
