MyHeritage operates a freemium online family history network with social tools, historical content, Smart Matching and Record Matching technologies, and offers DNA kits for genetic genealogy. The company announced the acquisition of rival Geni.com and said Geni's entire staff will join MyHeritage while Geni will continue to operate as a separate brand from its California office. The combined network extends MyHeritage to 72 million registered users, 1.5 billion profiles and 27 million family trees, and the product emphasizes collaborative family tree building and user-generated data. MyHeritage plans to use new capital to grow its historical content services, acquire significant record collections from Europe, roll out global crowd-sourcing projects and expand commercial and international marketing operations. The company also intends to explore additional M&A opportunities to accelerate growth. The announcement notes MyHeritage transformed from a garage start-up into a global company and highlights increased board and product talent following the Geni transaction. MyHeritage is an Israeli family‑history platform focused on genealogy and photo-centric features, including a facial‑recognition auto-tagging tool. Over the past year the site grew from 180 million profiles to 260 million and registered users from 17 million to 25 million. Users have uploaded 230 million photos; the site is available in 25 languages and attracts about 5 million monthly unique visitors. Support for ten more languages is slated to be released this month. Its facial‑recognition lets users train the service by tagging a few photos, after which MyHeritage auto-tags other photos of the same person and can sync photos to and from Picasa, Flickr, and Facebook. The company’s recent fundraising has increased its total capital raised to $24 million. MyHeritage is an Israeli genealogy service founded in 2005 that hosts family trees and historical records online. Its platform aggregates 180 million people profiles across 150,000 family trees from 17.2 million users, with about 150,000 new profiles added daily and over 100 million photos uploaded. After historically relying on desktop-based software uploads, MyHeritage recently redesigned its architecture and web interface to allow direct online data entry in 17 languages and a Flash-based tree viewer. The company acquired Pearl Street Software to add matching technology that detects overlaps across trees and enables consensual merging of trees. MyHeritage also offers a free genealogy metasearch engine accessing 1,200 genealogy databases worldwide. The company aims to map much of the world's genealogy and has a long-term goal of reaching 3 billion profiles to connect family relationships globally.

Total raised

$49M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Nov 2012