Indian startup Demoverse raises $600,000 to enable brands to build products directly with consumers

Demoverse, an AI powered co-creation platform that enables brands to build products directly with consumers, announced it has raised $600,000 in a pre-seed funding round.

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The round was led by Lumikai, an interactive media, digital platforms, and games focused VC fund.

Lumikai invested $500,000 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 deeptech, and a group of angel investors.

Founded by Akshay Mehta, 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.

“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,” Mehta said.

The startup is initially focusing on fashion and plans to expand into beauty, CPG and other consumer categories over time. Demoverse said it has conducted early trials with Indian consumer brands and plans to use the funding to convert some of those partnerships into paid campaigns and further develop its platform.

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.”