Metaweb Technologies, Inc. was a

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

based company that developed Freebase, described as an "open, shared database of the world's knowledge". The company was co-founded by

Danny Hillis William Daniel Hillis (born September 25, 1956) is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. He founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a parallel super ...

, Veda Hlubinka-Cook and

John Giannandrea John Giannandrea is a British software engineer and businessman. Career He co-founded Metaweb, led Google Search and artificial intelligence, was co-founder and CTO of the speech recognition company Tellme Networks, Chief Technologist of the ...

in 2005. Metaweb was acquired by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

in 2010. Google shut down Freebase in 2016, transferring some of the data that met the required notability criteria to

Wikidata Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, are able to use under the CC0 public domain ...

Funding

On March 14, 2006, Metaweb received $15 million in funding. Investors included

Benchmark Capital Benchmark is a venture capital firm founded in 1995 by Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, Kevin Harvey, and Val Vaden. The firm is known for its equal partnership structure and focus on early-stage investing, typically leading the firs ...

, Millennium Technology Ventures, and

Omidyar Network Omidyar Network is a self-styled "philanthropic investment firm," composed of a foundation and an impact investment firm. Established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, Omidyar Network has committed over US$1.5billion to no ...

. On January 15, 2008, Metaweb announced a $42.5 million

Series B A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture funding is among the ...

round led by

Goldman Sachs The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered in Lower Manhattan in New York City, with regional headquarters in many internationa ...

and Benchmark Capital. Kevin Harvey of Benchmark Capital was a member of Metaweb's board of directors.

Acquisition

On July 16, 2010, Google acquired Metaweb for an undisclosed sum.Deeper Understanding with Metaweb
(company press release)

References

{{Google LLC Companies based in San Francisco Online databases Semantic Web companies Software companies established in 2005 Google acquisitions Software companies disestablished in 2016 2010 mergers and acquisitions 2005 establishments in California 2016 disestablishments in California American companies established in 2005 American companies disestablished in 2016