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January 16, 2008

Freebase Takes $42 Million

Duncan Riley

22 comments »

Online database company Freebase has taken $42 Million in a round that included Benchmark Capital and Goldman Sachs. Total funding to date is $57 million.

We first covered Freebase in March 2007 (see “This is cool, unless it achieves consciousness and kills us all“). Freebase is a massive database. The purpose of the database is to centralize as much data as possible, and allow participants to freely add and access data - developers can extract information from Freebase via a set of APIs and add it to their web applications. It also builds relationships between highly structured pieces of data, something that can’t easily be done with distributed data controlled by different entities.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 8:35 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Technicle

    January 16th, 2008 at 9:55 am

    Not much done for the level of money they’ve secured to date…

  2. Tom

    January 16th, 2008 at 10:06 am

    Freebase?

    Who came up with that name?

  3. Macaroni Mike

    January 16th, 2008 at 10:08 am

    Yea really.

    Whats in a name anyway.

  4. magnusdopus

    January 16th, 2008 at 10:16 am

    That site is only as interesting as the data it contains, which is not very interesting. However with $57 million, they should be able to clean it up. I can’t really see there being a viable business model though.

  5. Jason

    January 16th, 2008 at 10:26 am

    This is extremely interesting. Their ambitions are enormous and their project is of great potential value to the web (semantic, 3.0, 2.7 or otherwise). However, as the first commenters point out, there is very little demonstrable progress to date.

    The revenue model will be there if they can control the data in the future. But again, I believe this model if far from being a sure thing.

  6. bbbase

    January 16th, 2008 at 11:03 am

    name and model are much like googlebase, obviously… is googlebase successful?..

  7. Ashy

    January 16th, 2008 at 11:19 am

    Wikipedia clone, said that, the only thing its got better than wikipedia is its web design. The $42M funding also shows what some VCs want: they want to be famous like Jimmy Wales….. they want fame… but unfortunately thats not gonna come their way. Freebase will be in deadpool once the funding capital is burned up.

  8. Trace

    January 16th, 2008 at 11:38 am

    Richard Pryor called and he wants his domain name back!

  9. Mark Madsen

    January 16th, 2008 at 12:00 pm

    They do have the possibility of doing something similar to Swivel, and maybe better. The problem I’ve seen with sites like Swivel or ManyEyes is in the data arena. People on those sites are polluting the data, constantly excerpting and reexcerpting data, making it kind of a mess. Freebase may offer better data controls, and could extend themselves into things on top of the data platform.

  10. Dyde

    January 16th, 2008 at 1:19 pm

    Damn they’re website looks like a domain spam placeholder. And Goldman paid $50mln for that? On top of that, looks like they reinvented SQL and HTML, why not use existing techs??

  11. gyula csocsan

    January 16th, 2008 at 1:53 pm

    57 million must be enough to test this site on the moon (:

  12. Peter

    January 16th, 2008 at 3:04 pm

    Wow, that’s a lot of cash! How did they get Goldman so crazy to pour it in the crazy idea?

  13. RR

    January 16th, 2008 at 4:10 pm

    NOTE: Two things happened this week in the Web Sematics world, each reflecting the opposite approach to the other. SPARQL (with RDF) became a W3C standard on one hand and FreeBase raised 57M$. The alarming reality is that these two approaches to Web Semantics are in plain conflict with each other. The SPARQL protocol promotes data linking between DISTRIBUTED datasets, while FreeBase promotes loading all the data in the world onto their CENTRALIZED database, with centralized data schemas etc..
    It will be interesting to see which of these two approaches will eventually prevail. One thing is for sure, yet again the IT world introduces conflicting technologies, on the same time, to solve the same general issues; too bad.

  14. dan

    January 16th, 2008 at 6:31 pm

    @rr It will be interesting to see which of these two approaches will eventually prevail

    Dude, you should be happy the new season of American Idol has started because the SPARQL/Freebase throw-down won’t be interesting at all. I can tell you right now neither will win. Both are flawed approaches to solving an non-existent problem. They merely show how really smart people sometimes act like idiots.

    Now if all these geniuses were working on solving global climate change problems, maybe polar bears wouldn’t be drowning.

  15. Mr. Crash

    January 16th, 2008 at 9:22 pm

    $57 million?…

    I wonder if they’ll spend it all freebasing…
    Thats a damn lot of the white stuff…

  16. Ben

    January 16th, 2008 at 11:14 pm

    hurray for schemas, and not just a bunch of text with links.

  17. Ashy

    January 17th, 2008 at 8:25 am

    Dyde, as I said VCs are thirsty for fame now! They are looking for a vehicle like crazy :)

  18. carmen

    January 17th, 2008 at 8:55 am

    i brought up “centralized” when Freebase was announced and Danny and Robert both said they considered a data web a ‘hard problem’ and the answer for now is ‘to centralize things’. hardcore parallel silicon and operating systems used to be a walk in the park for these guys and now they consider a solved problem a hard problem:

    just click an icon, all sorts of distributed data-web machinations kick into gear, aggregating Atom feeds of new torrents, finding peers for these over DHT, sharding the necessary parts, even generating rating concensus from multiple 3rd party providers like Digg, rottentomatoes and IMDB. on a more directly-related topic last i checked it was some college students in their spare time that did the work that lets me SPARQL wikipedia, not Metaweb. and i can install the free/open-source Virtuoso or Sesame and run a Freebase on my machine.. or EC2 cloud

    im not sure what their monetization/exit-plan of attack is. they could play catch-up in the neo-DB a la carte space if they want to protect their source code - simpleDB, force.com, dabbleDB etc. or they could try to become the next mySQL and give their database for free. Oracle already has RDF/graph features in their latest versions so an acquisition doenst look too likely there other than customer attrition reasons

  19. RR

    January 17th, 2008 at 4:05 pm

    To dan (14)
    Believe it or not, solving climate change problems can be done quicker with flexible and smart data exchange protocols.
    As for American Idol, well … can’t argue with that! That’s much more entertaining :)

    Cheers

    Love and Peace

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