Metaweb Technologies

About Metaweb Technologies

Metaweb Technologies, Inc. was a San Francisco-based firm established in July 2005 as a spin-out from the technology think-tank Applied Minds. The company was co-founded by Danny Hillis, Veda Hlubinka-Cook, and John Giannandrea, with the ambitious goal of creating a semantic data storage infrastructure for the internet. Hillis, a computer scientist and inventor known for pioneering parallel computing at his previous company, Thinking Machines Corp., brought a visionary approach to the venture. Giannandrea, who served as CTO, had prior experience as the chief technologist for the Web browser group at Netscape/AOL. The founding team aimed to build what they called an "open, shared database of the world's knowledge."

After operating in stealth mode, Metaweb launched its flagship product, Freebase, a massive, collaboratively-edited knowledge base. Freebase was designed to be read by computers, structuring information around entities—such as people, places, and concepts—and their complex relationships, moving beyond simple keyword-based information retrieval. For example, a query could involve multiple constraints like finding actors over 40 who had won an Oscar. The database, which grew to catalog over 12 million entities, was open for anyone to contribute to, query, and build applications upon, fostering a community-driven approach to data curation under a Creative Commons license. The company's primary focus was on developing the underlying technology to manage and query this vast, structured dataset, rather than a direct monetization strategy from the data itself.

Metaweb secured significant financial backing, raising a $15 million Series A round in 2006 from investors including Benchmark Capital and Omidyar Network, followed by a $42.5 million Series B in 2008 led by Goldman Sachs. The company's work on structuring data to enable more sophisticated, semantic search capabilities attracted major industry attention. In a landmark move on July 16, 2010, Google acquired Metaweb for an undisclosed sum. Google announced its intention to use Metaweb's technology to enhance its search engine's ability to understand complex queries and to further develop Freebase as an open resource. The technology and data from Metaweb became a foundational component of the Google Knowledge Graph, which powers the informational boxes that appear in Google search results. Google eventually shut down Freebase in 2016, migrating a portion of its data to Wikidata.