Pre-Seed · 2026

democra.ai

Your expertise, protected.

Your expertise as protected digital assets — usable but never exposed, owned by you.

TS
Tao Shen CEO
tao.shen@democra.ai · @tao_shen_
The Problem

Expert Skills Power AI Without Compensation

$0
returned to 3M+ creators whose expertise powers today's AI agent platforms.
01
Expert Creates Skill
Workflows, prompts, decision logic
02
Published Free on Platforms
3M+ GPTs & Skills, zero compensation
03
AI Absorbs Your Expertise
Skills are the new training data
04
Expert Becomes Replaceable
57% of work already automatable
3M+
Skills published free across GPT Store, Claude & agent platforms
$0
Returned to the creators who made them
375M
Workers must change careers by 2030 — McKinsey
The Solution

Keep Ownership of Your Expertise

democra.ai is a privacy-first marketplace where human expertise is packaged into AI agents — usable but never exposed, owned and priced by their creators.

Skill-Powered Agents
Your expertise is wrapped into agents. Users get task outcomes — never the underlying knowledge.
Hands-Off Platform
The platform facilitates matching, execution, and settlement — it never owns or learns your skills.
Full Creator Control
Control who uses your skills, set pricing, revoke access anytime. Your rules, your revenue.
LLMs
General Intelligence
Agents
Task Execution & Orchestration
Skills ★
User-owned decision logic
↑ We protect and monetize this layer
How skills stay protected
Request
Skill (sealed)
Result only
Market Size

A $500B+ Opportunity

TAM $500B+ AI Agents + Knowledge Economy SAM $80B Skill Marketplace + Agent Toolchain SOM $5B Initial Verticals We start here
45.8% CAGR
AI Agent Market CAGR
$5.1B 2024 $50.3B by 2030
Grand View Research, 2025
$529B by 2030
Creator Economy by 2030
$205B 2024 $529B 22.5% CAGR
Grand View Research, 2024
38.7% CAGR
Data Privacy Software CAGR
$4B 2024 $45.7B by 2032
SAC Insight, 2024
3M+ AI skills already published across platforms with zero creator compensation, 85M talent shortage by 2030, 84% of developers already using AI tools — the demand for protected, monetizable skills is exploding.
Product

How It Works

1
Package
Encapsulate tacit knowledge as a Skill
2
List
Publish with full creator control
3
Discover
Agents find the right skills
4
Execute
Runs in secure environment
5
Earn
Revenue + full ownership
User

Skill Building Studio

Create skills from professional files, projects, or AI conversations

Skill Marketplace

Open frontend — listed, discovered, traded

AI Agent

CPU Trusted Execution

Sandboxed CPU TEE — agents get results only

GPU Confidential Compute

Encrypted inference inside the GPU enclave

⬡ Confidential Compute Foundation
Hardware Attestation
Encrypted GPU Memory
Verifiable Execution Proof
Sealed Key Management
Traction

Early Momentum

Validated the problem, built the product, and launched viral campaigns to prove market demand.

Development Timeline
Q4 2025
Market Research
Expert interviews, competitive analysis, architecture design
Q1 2026
AIR Campaign Launch
AI Replacement Risk Calculator — raised privacy awareness and validated market anxiety
Q1–Q2 2026 — Now
Building MVP
Core Skill packaging engine, confidential execution PoC, platform prototype
Q3 2026
Closed Beta
First experts onboarded, marketplace matching live
Q4 2026
Public Launch
Open marketplace, token incentives, 1,000+ users target
Why Now
Signal 01
3M+ Skills Already Published
Massive volume of expert skills freely available on GPT Store, Claude, and agent platforms — with zero creator compensation.
Signal 02
LLMs Are Absorbing Skills Now
Foundation models are actively training on expert-created skills and workflows — the window to establish ownership is closing fast.
Signal 03
Peak AI Replacement Anxiety
Industry-wide fear of being replaced by AI is at an all-time high — professionals urgently need tools to protect their expertise.
Privacy Awareness Campaign
AIR — AI Replacement Risk Calculator
A tool to raise awareness about AI privacy risks — shows how easily your professional skills can be replicated, urging knowledge workers to protect their expertise.
Team

Built by AI Researchers,
for Knowledge Workers

TS
Tao Shen
Founder & CEO

Zhejiang University PhD candidate in AI & Distributed Systems. 5+ years of research in ML, federated learning, and privacy-preserving computation. Deep understanding of AI democratization challenges.

ZZ
Ziyu Zhao
Co-founder & CTO

Zhejiang University PhD (Chu Kochen Honors College). Research on modular LLM training, Mixture-of-Experts, agents & causal inference. Production experience at ByteDance, Alibaba & NetEase deploying large-scale AI systems.

DZ
Didi Zhu
Co-founder & CPO

Postdoc at Imperial College London, PhD from Zhejiang University. Expert in multimodal LLMs, vision-language alignment, and RL for foundation models. Core contributor to the LLaVA-OneVision-1.5-RL open-source framework.

Key Hires Planned
Full-Stack Engineer
Confidential Computing Engineer
Community Lead
Competition

Competitive Landscape

Skill-as-asset is emerging — but no one combines bidirectional privacy across CPU + GPU TEEs, full creator control, and a unified market for both AI and human skills.

Creator IP Protection × Control
As of March 2026
Platform-Controlled → Creator-Controlled Low Creator IP Protection → High Creator IP Protection Protected but platform-controlled Target zone: creator-controlled + private Traditional platforms Open but no IP protection SkillMarket.space AI skill market — no IP protection Upwork · Fiverr No IP protection, manual delivery OpenAI · Anthropic · Google Foundation models (complementary) democra.ai
SkillMarket.space
AI skill market — AI-only, no human expertise, no privacy protection
Upwork · Fiverr
Manual delivery, zero IP protection, no AI integration
OpenAI · Anthropic · Google
Foundation model providers — complementary, expand our addressable market
Why democra.ai Wins
Bidirectional privacy — seller logic & buyer data both protected, only results delivered
Tamper-proof control — pricing, revocation, ownership enforced by hardware-attested execution
AI + Human unified — one marketplace, model-agnostic, no lock-in
Financials

Revenue Model & Projections

Revenue Streams
40%
Transaction Fees
5-15% commission per skill usage
25%
Premium Subscriptions
Advanced analytics, priority matching
20%
Enterprise API / SDK
Licensing for enterprise integrations
15%
Confidential Compute Fees
Secure compute environment usage
3-Year Projections
Year 1 Year 2 Year 3
Users 1,000 15,000 100,000
Skills Listed 200 5,000 50,000
GMV$500K$8M$80M
Revenue $50K $1.2M $12M
5x+
Target LTV / CAC — near-zero marginal cost per transaction
85%+
Target gross margin — software-only platform model
10%
Blended take rate — competitive for creator platforms
18 mo
Target path to breakeven — lean team, low burn
Investment

Pre-Seed Round

Use of Funds

60%
Product Development
25%
Team Expansion
10%
Operations
5%
Legal & Compliance

Milestones

3 Months
MVP Launch — First Skills listed, core marketplace live
6 Months
1,000 Users — Vertical communities in research, legal, medical
12 Months
Seed Round — PMF proven, scaling team & expansion
Let's keep expert knowledge with the people who created it

We're looking for investors who believe the knowledge economy should remain in the hands of its creators.