YZi Investment Funes: The global AI digital backup plan that prevents the world from being forgotten has been launched.

From ancient temples and historical ruins to modern skyscrapers, humanity has built the trajectory of civilization through thousands of years of effort, but these buildings are aging and disappearing at an accelerated pace. In the face of this slow yet irreversible cultural decline, AI and the Web3 startup Funes propose a bold vision: to create a “digital backup” for humanity's architectural heritage. Recently, the tech investment firm YZi Labs announced its investment in Funes to help build the world's largest 3D architectural database, ushering in a new era of cultural preservation.

Funes' mission: to preserve the memory of human architecture using 3D technology

Funes is a wall-less museum, a massive project that scans and preserves global architecture using digital modeling techniques. They combine crowdsourced photogrammetry technology with computer vision models, allowing every building—whether a world heritage site or an old house in the hometown—to have the opportunity to be digitized and permanently preserved.

These models not only look “realistic”, but also come with textual descriptions, images, structural data, and other multimodal information, becoming valuable resources for education, research, creation, and AI training.

The Future Seen by YZi: Empowering Cultural Assets with Web3 and AI

This investment for YZi Labs is not just a bet on a tech startup, but a concrete manifestation of its long-term investment philosophy — supporting projects that connect culture, AI, and Web3 infrastructure. “Funes is like GitHub for the physical world, allowing everyone to create, preserve, and share cultural architectural models,” said Dana H., partner at YZi Labs. “This is the mission of human memory, not just technological innovation.”

YZi Labs believes that Funes is creating a “cultural blockchain”: using a decentralized approach to ensure that these models are not forgotten, not monopolized, and not erased.

Three major core expansions: How does Funes spend this money?

YZi's funding will support Funes in expanding the following three key areas:

Globalizing modeling networks: Expanding 3D scanning tasks around the world, continuously documenting historical and modern architecture.

Online interaction upgrade: Optimize platform user experience, allowing the public to freely explore architectural models and the stories behind them.

AI Deep Integration: Integrated with cutting-edge technologies such as 3D Gaussian Splatting, Radiance Fields, and LLMs for generative content, educational simulations, digital restoration, and more innovative applications.

Funes co-founder Wang Hanyang pointed out: “We are building an unprecedented database for AI and the virtual world, which will become a digital cultural infrastructure accessible to everyone.”

Crowd-driven digital preservation movement: You can participate too!

The core of Funes is not just in technology, but in openness. This is a cultural data collection movement that global citizens can participate in. You can:

Capture and Upload Architecture: Use your phone, camera, or drone to scan the buildings you consider important.

Write a description or comment: share your memories, history, or research supplementary content about architecture.

Submit scan request: Need a model for creation or research? The Funes team can go for the scan based on the request.

Recommended literature and buildings: Assist the platform in collecting more diverse data and references.

Every contribution preserves a piece of memory for the world.

The name Funes comes from the character “Funes the Memorious” in Borges' novel, symbolizing a complete memory of all details of everything. This new project also aims to construct such a memory system for human civilization: using technology to record every structure we have ever built and preserve it eternally in digital space.

This article YZi invests in Funes: the global AI digital backup plan that allows the world to not be forgotten has been launched. It first appeared in Chain News ABMedia.