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.