A deed office for spatial reality - registering, protecting and licensing the world's most valuable 3D assets in the age of generative AI.
Right now, somewhere, a generative model is being fed a photograph of a Zaha Hadid building it was never licensed to learn from. The curve, the cantilever, the impossible geometry - all of it quietly absorbed, remixed, and served back to whoever typed the prompt. The architect gets nothing. Treasury exists to change the ending of that sentence.
Founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, Treasury is a registry and discovery system for spatial assets - the architectural designs, film scenes and sets, real estate, world monuments, experiential art and nature scans that make up the built and captured world. It is not a stock library and not a metaverse. It is closer to a records office: a place where the most valuable spaces on Earth get a title, a fingerprint, and a price.
The pitch is simple enough to fit on a business card and big enough to keep a lawyer up at night. In the era of spatial computing and generative AI, Treasury protects and distributes the work of spatial creators - architects, real estate owners, artists, engineers and reality-capture professionals - so their work can be found, licensed, and rewarded instead of scraped.
Treasury's product is less a single app than a set of interlocking mechanisms. Register the asset. Fingerprint it. Let builders license it. Each move is boring on its own; together they form a rights layer for the 3D world.
A curated catalogue of the world's most valuable spatial assets - from a landmark tower to a scanned forest floor - each with provenance and ownership attached.
A private discovery engine (request access at treasury.space/builder) that lets creators of digital environments find and license premium assets directly from their makers.
Techniques - developed with Zaha Hadid Architects - to fingerprint assets, monitor licensed use, and turn 'design DNA' into licensed, creator-rewarding AI training material.
"Treasury protects and distributes the work of spatial creators in the era of spatial computing and generative AI."
Treasury raised roughly $2.6M in seed capital. The number is modest; the names are not. Google's AI-focused fund sits alongside marquee venture shops and a handful of sharp angels - the kind of list that signals a thesis, not just a check.
An architect and environmental scientist with a specialization in computational design, split between Stockholm and San Francisco. He read at Oxford, took a diploma in architecture in Stockholm, and taught urban design at the Royal Institute of Technology. Before Treasury he authored sustainable-city handbooks for the UN and WWF - which is a long way of saying he has spent a career worrying about how humans build, and who pays for it.
That biography is the tell. Treasury is not a crypto flip dressed as a marketplace; it is a design-and-policy person's answer to a design-and-policy problem. When AI can generate a plausible skyscraper in seconds, the scarce thing is not the image - it is the credit, the consent, and the cheque.
Most seed-stage startups list advisors. Treasury lists co-founders that happen to be among the most recognizable names in architecture. That is either audacious or well-connected - probably both.
The firm behind some of the most photographed buildings on Earth. Jointly launched Treasury's platform and helped pioneer the spatial-fingerprinting and design-DNA techniques.
A spatial platform backed by Bjarke Ingels Group, Thomas Heatherwick and UNStudio - three more of the field's heaviest hitters.
Google's AI fund, betting on Treasury's thesis that the next era of AI should be built on licensed, creator-rewarding training data.
Treasury is founded in San Francisco by John Manoochehri, co-founded with Zaha Hadid Architects and Spaceform.
Roughly $2.6M in seed capital raised from Gradient Ventures, FJ Labs, Maveron, Backend Capital and angels including Lucy Guo and Packy McCormick.
Treasury and Zaha Hadid Architects publicly launch a creator- and quality-focused spatial asset platform, unveiling fingerprinting and 'design DNA' for licensed AI use.
Builders of digital environments are invited to request access to a private discovery engine at treasury.space/builder.