Lumikai Leads $600K Pre-seed Round In Demoverse

Lumikai has led a $600K pre-seed round in Demoverse, an AI-powered co-creation platform that lets brands build products directly with consumers. Lumikai invested $500K through Pixels, its pre-seed programme for founders building the next generation of interactive platforms, with participation from Marlan, the UAE-based investor-operator focused on deep tech, and a group of angel investors.

Getting product predictions wrong is expensive: McKinsey and BoF estimate that the fashion industry alone produced between $70Bn and $140Bn of excess inventory in 2023. On Demoverse, brands post a product concept with guidelines for what can change, consumers use AI to reshape and refine it, and the wider community votes on the strongest directions. Brands get a clear product direction and a demand signal before committing to production, and contributors whose ideas shape the winning design earn royalties when it is commercialised. Demoverse calls this the move from User Generated Content to User Generated Products, or UGC to UGP.

Founder Akshay Mehta helped build the UAE’s first commercial-scale satellite manufacturing facility, after eight years across investing, consulting and operating roles at Bain, Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India), Asia Alternatives and the Royal Group’s deep tech investment platform. Starting with fashion, Demoverse plans to expand into beauty, CPG and other consumer categories, and will use the capital to convert early brand trials into paid campaigns, build its US go-to-market and grow its creator community. For Lumikai, the investment extends its thesis on interactive consumer platforms, where AI turns passive audiences into active participants in what gets created.

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