Demoverse Raises $600K to Let Shoppers Design Products
Demoverse has raised $600,000 led by Lumikai for a platform where shoppers redesign brand concepts using AI and earn royalties if their version gets made. The pitch is a demand signal before production, in an industry that made up to 5 billion unsold garments in 2023.
The fashion industry made somewhere between 2.5 billion and 5 billion garments in 2023 that nobody bought. McKinsey and the Business of Fashion put the value of that unsold pile at $70 billion to $140 billion.
Demoverse wants brands to ask first.
The company has raised $600,000, roughly ₹5 crore, in a pre-seed round led by Lumikai, the Indian fund focused on interactive media, digital platforms and games. Lumikai put in $500,000 of it through Pixels, its pre-seed programme. Marlan, a UAE investor-operator, and a group of angels supplied the rest.
Founder Akshay Mehta started the company this year.
How it is supposed to work
A brand posts a product concept along with rules about what can and cannot change. Consumers use AI tools inside those guardrails to rework the design. The wider community then votes on which versions are strongest, and the brand gets a direction before committing to a production run.
Contributors whose ideas shape a winning design earn royalties if the product is commercialised. Demoverse calls the shift from user generated content to user generated products, UGC to UGP.
It is starting in fashion, where people hold firm opinions about how things look, and says it intends to move into beauty and packaged consumer goods later. It has run early trials with Indian brands and is using this round to turn those into paid campaigns and to open a US go-to-market.
The royalty promise is the genuinely new part
Plenty of companies have run design contests. What is different here is paying contributors a continuing share when something sells, which turns a marketing exercise into a commercial relationship with strangers.
It also raises questions the announcement does not answer. When a consumer uses a brand's AI tool, inside the brand's guidelines, on the brand's concept, who owns the resulting design is not obvious, and it is the kind of thing that gets decided in terms and conditions rather than in a press release. Nor is it clear how contributions get attributed when a hundred people converge on a similar direction, which is exactly what tends to happen when a crowd works from the same brief. Royalty accounting for a small number of named designers is ordinary. Doing it for a large, anonymous and partly automated crowd is not something the consumer industry has infrastructure for yet.
"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," said Akshay Mehta, founder of Demoverse.
A vote is not a purchase
The pitch rests on the idea that community voting produces a demand signal ahead of production. It produces a preference signal, which is a weaker thing.
Asking people which of two jackets they like better costs them nothing and tells you what they prefer among the options in front of them. It does not tell you whether they would hand over ₹4,000 for one. The gap between stated preference and actual spending is the oldest problem in consumer research, and it is precisely the gap that produced those billions of unsold garments in the first place. Survey data did not fail brands because there was too little of it.
The version of this that would genuinely de-risk a production run is a pre-order, where the signal costs the consumer something. Whether Demoverse gets there matters more than how many people vote.
Lumikai's second fashion bet of the year
This is not the fund's first cheque into this intersection. In May 2026 it led a $400,000 pre-seed into Meta Fashion, a digital fashion platform building AI-generated clothing for virtual worlds and user generated content. Four months later it is leading a pre-seed into consumers co-designing physical clothing with AI.
Both bets sit on the same view, which the fund states openly: as AI drops the cost of creating things, audiences stop being audiences.
"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," said Salone Sehgal, Founder and Managing Partner at Lumikai.
Mehta spent eight years in investing, consulting and operating roles, including at Bain, Z47 and Asia Alternatives, and worked on building the UAE's first commercial-scale satellite manufacturing facility. Demoverse is part of NVIDIA's Inception programme. It joins a widening field of Indian AI companies selling into consumer brands, and Lumikai has also been backing interactive AI platforms outside fashion entirely.
Common questions
What does Demoverse do?
It lets consumer brands post product concepts that shoppers then rework using AI within brand guidelines. The community votes on the strongest versions, and contributors to a winning design earn royalties if it goes into production.
Who invested in Demoverse?
Lumikai led with $500,000 of the $600,000 round, through its Pixels pre-seed programme. Marlan and a group of angel investors provided the remainder.
What is UGP?
User generated products, the company's term for consumers helping design the physical products a brand sells, rather than only creating content about them.
Round size, investor names, product description and quotes come from the company's announcement of 22 September 2026. The excess inventory figures are from McKinsey and the Business of Fashion's State of Fashion 2025 report. Founding year is from Tracxn.
