Metaweb Technologies, Inc. was a

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

-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 "Danny" 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 parall ...

, Veda Hlubinka-Cook and

John Giannandrea John Giannandrea is a Scottish software engineer and businessman. He co-founded Metaweb, led Google Search and artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information� ...

in 2005. Metaweb was acquired by

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

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, can use under the CC0 public domain license ...

Funding

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

Benchmark Capital Benchmark is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco that provides seed money to startups. History The firm's most successful investment was a 1997 investment of $6.7 million in eBay for 22.1% of the company. In 2011, it invested $12 mil ...

, 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 $1.5billion to ...

. 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 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 Companies established in 2005 Google acquisitions