Investing in 404-GEN
We’re reaching a point where the line between virtual and physical is dissolving. Skills, identities, and economies are moving fluidly between both realms. Professional gamers are transitioning from racing sims to real tracks—lapping within seconds of F1 drivers. Helicopter pilots are now logging real training hours in VR. Creators are building million-dollar businesses entirely inside digital spaces.
As more of life migrates into realistic digital environments, those spaces must be constructed from the ground up, with 3D content as the substrate. Every immersive experience—whether a game, simulation, or spatial experience—relies on a vast network of 3D assets.
Whoever builds the infrastructure to generate 3D content at scale efficiently will capture a critical layer of the next digital economy.
That’s why we’ve invested in 404-GEN.
We believe 404-GEN can become the largest and most performant compute network for AI-driven 3D asset generation—serving everyone from individual creators to AAA studios building AI-native games and virtual worlds.
We met Ben James, founder of 404-GEN, in early 2024 at a decentralized AI event in NYC. At the time, he was building Atlas, a company that helps AAA studios build AI-driven pipelines for 3D generation. He saw firsthand how fragmented the space was—everyone was experimenting, but no one was aligned. There was no system to reward progress or organize the frontier.
So he built one.
Ben launched 404-GEN as a Bittensor subnet; a coordination layer for 3D AI generation that exists to reward whoever builds the best model. The protocol is model-agnostic, performance-maximalist. It doesn’t care how assets are generated—only their relative performance.
In a field where breakthroughs happen weekly and architectures evolve overnight, locking into one approach is a dead end. 404-GEN avoids that trap by turning 3D generation into an open market. Contributors compete to produce the highest-quality assets, where the top performers receive a higher share of the 404-GEN’s token rewards.
Researchers, engineers, and hackers converge on the network to fine-tune open-source models, invent their own, or optimize pipelines however they see fit. The result is a permissionless, self-improving system where experimentation is rewarded and state-of-the-art keeps moving forward.
Underwater world created in Unreal Engine developed entirely using 3D assets on 404-GEN
And the system is working.
404-GEN has already generated 21.5M+ high-quality 3D models—the largest open-source dataset of its kind, with metadata, usage rights, and attribution.
It’s integrated directly into Unity via a Verified Solution plugin on the Asset Store. Creators simply input a prompt inside the Unity editor and a top-ranked contributor on the 404-GEN network generates a model, returning it directly into the project.
It’s been used to build games and environments in Unreal Engine and Unity by creators with no prior 3D experience.
Racing game created in Unity developed entirely using 3D assets on 404-GEN
Ben and his team bring a rare mix of deep technical expertise, cryptoeconomic fluency, and product vision. We couldn’t be more excited to watch them continue to push the 3D AI frontier forward and turn 404-GEN into the default engine for 3D content creation.
