YZi Labs Funds Innovative Funes Project to Digitize and Protect World's Architectural Treasures

YZi Labs, known for its investments in Web3, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, has announced an investment in the Funes project - a digital heritage platform creating the largest open archive of 3D architectural models. This investment aims to develop an AI-integrated online museum that will preserve humanity's physical legacy in digital form.

At its core, Funes operates as a smart digital museum, gathering and maintaining detailed 3D representations of structures created by people throughout history. By leveraging community-contributed photogrammetry techniques and sophisticated computer vision tools, it captures everything from ancient temples and skyscrapers to forgotten ruins and everyday buildings, ensuring they're documented before time or events erase them. So far, the platform has converted around 1,000 such sites into digital form - including sacred sites, historical remnants, religious complexes, and contemporary icons - with ambitions to expand by more than 1,000 entries each year. These models come enriched with layers of information like descriptive texts, photos, and technical specs, forming a valuable resource for researchers, artists, and innovators.

The infusion of capital from YZi Labs targets three main pillars: enhancing 3D capture methods to cover global historical and modern sites more thoroughly,developing an intuitive web interface for users to interact with and navigate the collections and embedding AI features that merge authentic data with innovations such as 3D Gaussian Splatting, Radiance Fields, and large-scale language models to enable creative, analytical, and learning-oriented uses.

"Meeting the Funes crew sparked a sense of real purpose - they're equipped to make this vision happen. It's essentially a collaborative hub for the tangible world, letting people build, archive, and exchange precise 3D replicas of key cultural structures. This not only locks in our architectural past but also opens doors for exploration, tweaks, and future advancements" commented Dana H, an investment partner at YZi Labs.

Previously operating as Binance Labs, YZi Labs oversees assets exceeding $10 billion worldwide and supports over 300 initiatives spanning more than 25 nations on six continents. This partnership with Funes fits their strategy of championing ventures that fuse heritage preservation, AI capabilities, and robust data systems into enduring digital resources.

The initiative underscores a rising trend in using tech to defend cultural assets amid threats like environmental changes and urban expansion. Funes envisions itself as a timeless virtual vault, making sure future eras can access and appreciate the physical imprints of human achievement.