Backed by $5 million in venture capital and a half-million beta users, Fanbase officially launched today with dreams of becoming the go-to site for sports fanatics and researchers.

As TechCrunch reports:

Fanbase has already attracted over 500,000 users who have made more than 60,000 contributions according to the company website, which also reveals that there are currently over 1.7 million athletes and 20,000 teams in the directory.

If those sound like pretty big numbers, that’s because Fanbase has some pretty big plans. From the site’s “About” page:

The company’s long-term vision is to be the definitive source of information on every athlete that has ever played sports, from famous to not-so-famous, professional to amateur, and present-day to distant past.

Fanbase was started in early 2008 by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nirav Tolia. The company is funded by Benchmark Capital.