Demoverse plans to use the funding to convert early brand partnerships into paid campaigns, expand into the US market and grow its consumer creator community.
Bengaluru, September 23, 2026: AI-powered product co-creation platform Demoverse has raised $600,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Lumikai, a venture capital firm focused on interactive media, digital platforms and gaming.
Lumikai invested $500,000 through Lumikai Pixels, its pre-seed programme for founders building next-generation interactive platforms. The round also saw participation from Marlan, a UAE-based investor-operator focused on deep technology, along with a group of angel investors.
Demoverse is building a platform that allows consumer brands to involve customers directly in the product-development process. Instead of limiting consumer participation to feedback, surveys or user-generated content, the company enables users to modify and refine product concepts using artificial intelligence before voting on preferred designs.
The company describes the model as a transition from User Generated Content (UGC) to User Generated Products (UGP).
Bringing Consumers Into Product Creation
On Demoverse, brands can publish an initial product concept or design direction and define parameters around what consumers can and cannot modify.
Consumers can then use AI tools to reshape the concept, develop variations and refine different product directions. The broader community evaluates and votes on those ideas, helping brands identify stronger concepts and potential demand before committing resources to manufacturing.
Consumers whose ideas contribute to winning product designs can also earn royalties once the products are commercialised, creating an economic incentive for participation.
The approach is aimed at addressing a persistent challenge across consumer industries: predicting which products customers will actually buy.
Demoverse believes giving consumers an active role earlier in the product-development cycle could help brands gain stronger demand signals before making large production commitments.
From Satellite Manufacturing to Consumer AI
Demoverse was founded by Akshay Mehta, whose previous experience includes helping build the UAE’s first commercial-scale satellite manufacturing facility.
Before starting Demoverse, Mehta spent around eight years across investment, consulting and operating roles, including positions with Bain, Z47 — formerly Matrix Partners India — Asia Alternatives and the UAE Royal Group’s deep-tech investment platform.
Speaking about the opportunity, Mehta said social media has made consumers comfortable expressing opinions about products and culture, while generative AI has increasingly given people the ability to translate those ideas into visual concepts.
“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.
Demoverse Starts With Fashion
The startup is initially focusing on the fashion industry, where consumer preferences around design, aesthetics and visual identity can play a significant role in purchasing decisions.
Demoverse has already conducted early trials with Indian consumer brands and plans to use the fresh capital to convert those partnerships into paid campaigns.
Over time, the company plans to expand the co-creation model into categories including beauty, consumer packaged goods (CPG) and other consumer segments.
The funding will also support Demoverse’s US go-to-market strategy and expansion of its consumer creator community.
Lumikai Bets on User Generated Products
For Lumikai, the investment reflects its broader thesis that advances in AI will reduce the cost and complexity of creating digital and physical products, allowing consumers to move from being passive audiences to becoming active participants in the creation process.
Salone Sehgal, Founder and Managing Partner at Lumikai, said AI could dramatically increase the number of products companies can create, but determining what consumers actually want will remain a critical challenge.
“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,” Sehgal said.
She added that Lumikai sees User Generated Products as a potential evolution of the user-generated content economy, where consumers participate not only in creating content around brands but also in designing the products themselves.
Building an AI-Led Co-Creation Ecosystem
Demoverse’s model combines generative AI, community participation and demand validation, giving brands an opportunity to test product directions while involving prospective customers much earlier in the innovation cycle.
The company is also part of the NVIDIA Inception programme, which supports startups working with advanced technologies.
With its latest funding, Demoverse will focus on expanding commercial partnerships and testing whether its UGP model can become a scalable approach for consumer product development across global markets.
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