Family Tree Wars Continue: MyHeritage Raises Big Round, Shows Impressive Growth

It’s been just a few days after our post on Geni’s big growth numbers – and now big news from Israeli competitor MyHeritage.

The site has grown from 180 million profiles a year ago to 260 million today, they say. Registered users have also grown, from 17 million to 25 million. Compare that to almost 2 million users for Geni. 230 million photos have been uploaded to the site, which is available in 25 languages and has 5 million monthly unique visitors. Support for ten more language will be released this month.

Investors have certainly noticed MyHeritage’s stellar growth. The company has raised a new round of funding – $15 million in a Series D round led by Index Ventures and joined by current investor Accel Partners. That brings their total capital raised to $24 million.

New Features – Recognize Those Faces

MyHeritage’s facial recognition, which works a little like recent Picasa enhancements, lets you train the service by tagging a few photos of an individual. MyHeritage then starts to auto-tag other photos that you upload of that person, too. Users don’t have to upload photos directly, either. They can sync from Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, etc. And once the photos are properly tagged with people’s names, MyHeritage will re-sync them back to the original services.

Just to reiterate that, MyHeritage has created a heck of a tool to let users auto-tag photos with people’s names on the services they already use.