The Registry at the Edge of the Spatial Web
Most people who want to protect architectural IP start with a law firm. John Manoochehri started with a decade of environmental policy writing, a Stockholm architecture school, a sustainable design firm that contributed to moving an entire city, and an Oxford degree in ancient languages.
The ancient languages part is not incidental. The problem Manoochehri has spent the last several years solving is fundamentally one of syntax: how do you describe, classify, and assert ownership over a spatial asset in a world where AI systems can ingest architectural drawings, film sets, real estate scans, and city monuments without asking anyone's permission? You need a registry. You need a language. And you need infrastructure that didn't exist before.
That infrastructure is Treasury. Co-founded in 2022 with Zaha Hadid Architects and Spaceform - itself backed by BIG, Heatherwick Studio, and UNStudio - Treasury is building what Manoochehri calls "a registry and discovery system for the world's most valuable spatial assets." The bet: that spatial content will need the same rights management layer that music got with Spotify and ASCAP. Every architectural design, film set, monument scan, and nature capture deserves a record of provenance, a mechanism for licensing, and a system for getting paid.
"The spatial web will mirror how the internet emerged - not as a destination, but as an embedded infrastructure layer across society."
- John ManoochehriGoogle noticed. Gradient Ventures - Google's AI-focused investment fund - is among the investors who have backed Treasury alongside Backend Capital, FJ Labs, Gossamer Capital, and Maveron. In Silicon Valley terms, that's a table that reads like the future is already decided.
But what makes Manoochehri unusual is everything that preceded Treasury. His career reads less like a startup founder's origin story and more like a person who kept following the same problem - how humans organize space, who owns it, and what happens when those rules get rewritten - through radically different institutions.
From Oxford to the UN to a Moving City
At Oxford, Manoochehri studied ancient languages and Indian studies. Then he trained in classical music. Then he picked up a diploma in architecture from KKH - the Royal Institute of Art's graduate program in Stockholm, one of Scandinavia's most rigorous architecture schools. Then he went to work for the United Nations.
At UNEP in Geneva, he wrote "Consumption Opportunities" - the UN Environment Programme's policy framework on sustainable urban consumption. At WWF, he authored "Urban Solutions," a global handbook integrating the UN Sustainable Development Goals with the WWF's urban model. These are not the credentials of someone who wanted to move fast and break things. They are the credentials of someone who wanted to understand systems well enough to build new ones from scratch.
His architectural practice, Resource Vision, worked alongside BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), White Arkitekter, and Strategisk Arkitekter on some of the largest urban projects in Swedish history. One of those was Kiruna - a city in northern Sweden that had to be physically relocated because the iron ore mine beneath it had destabilized the ground. Moving an entire city is, by most measures, the largest possible proof-of-concept for systems thinking applied to space.
Moving a city takes systems thinking at a scale most architects never encounter. Manoochehri was in that room.
He also founded Last Meter, an architectural technology company built with the support of the Swedish Real Estate Federation. Last Meter addressed something specific: how service-based consumption patterns - car-sharing, clothing rental, flexible leases - could be integrated into architectural design from the ground up, rather than retrofitted later. It was about changing the relationship between space and ownership at the building level.
Treasury: The Spatial Asset Rights Layer
The logic connecting all of this becomes clear when you understand what Treasury does. Generative AI has created a crisis for spatial creators. Architects, reality-capture professionals, film set designers, and urban artists produce content - 3D models, scans, drawings, immersive environments - that AI companies can ingest and train on without attribution, license, or payment. There is no Spotify for a spatial asset. There is no ASCAP for an architectural drawing. Until now, there has been no registry.
Treasury is that registry. The platform protects and distributes the work of spatial creators in the era of spatial computing - cataloging assets, establishing provenance, enabling licensing, and building the pipelines that let architects and designers actually get paid when their work is used. The co-founding partners are not incidental: Zaha Hadid Architects brings the most recognized architectural IP in the world; Spaceform brings deep visualization technology from a firm backed by the biggest names in parametric design.
In January 2024, Treasury hosted an Apple Vision Pro launch event that sold out. The company's 24-person team is based in San Francisco, on the block where the spatial web is being built - literally, at 550 15th Street.