Metaweb

This article is about the company Metaweb Technologies. For the defunct Quicksilver Wiki, previously known as The Metaweb, see Neal Stephenson.

Metaweb Technologies, Inc. was a San Francisco–based company that developed Freebase, described as an "open, shared database of the world's knowledge". The company was co-founded by Danny Hillis, Veda Hlubinka-Cook and John Giannandrea in 2005.^[3]

Metaweb Technologies, Inc.

Company type	Private
Industry	Data management
Founded	July 2005; 19 years ago (2005-07)
Founder	Veda Hlubinka-Cook, Danny Hillis, John Giannandrea
Fate	acquired by Google in July 2010[1]
Headquarters	San Francisco, California , United States
Key people	Kurt Bollacker (Chief scientist) Danny Hillis (Chairman) Thomas Layton (CEO)[2] Veda Hlubinka-Cook EVP, product development John Giannandrea (CTO)
Products	Freebase — an online database
Website	www.metaweb.com

Metaweb was acquired by Google in 2010.^[1] Google shut down Freebase in 2016, transferring some of the data that met the required notability criteria to Wikidata.^[4][5][6]

Funding

On March 14, 2006, Metaweb received $15 million in funding. Investors included Benchmark Capital, Millennium Technology Ventures, and Omidyar Network.^[7] On January 15, 2008, Metaweb announced a $42.5 million Series B round led by Goldman Sachs and Benchmark Capital.^[8]

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.^[9]