MyHeritage.com Acquires Family Tree Backup Service BackupMyTree

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
backuptree

MyHeritage.com, a relatively heavily-funded Israeli startup operating a huge family-based social network, this morning announced that it has acquired BackupMyTree, which enables people to automatically backup their family history for free.

This is the sixth acquisition by MyHeritage.com – recent purchases include Germany’s OSN , Poland’s Bliscy.pl and Dutch Family Network ZOOOF.

One year after launching, BackupMyTree’s backup service is said to protect over 9 TB of family tree data off-site, uploaded by genealogists and family history enthusiasts.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but don’t expect this to be a huge deal: the BackupMyTree team is promptly moving on to a new venture dubbed Mocavo, a free genealogy search engine.

Coincidentally, BackupMyTree is the second company that MyHeritage.com has purchased from entrepreneur Cliff Shaw, having acquired Pearl Street Software, makers of GenCircles.com and Family Tree Legends, back in 2007.

MyHeritage.com, which boasts an international registered member base of 60 million users and offers its services in 38 languages, says it will continue to maintain the service and keep it free. The company says its is now home to more than 800 million profiles and 20 million family trees.

MyHeritage.com is backed by Index Ventures and Accel Partners.


Company: MyHeritage.com
Website: myheritage.com
Launch Date: 2005
Funding: $49M

MyHeritage is a family-oriented social network service and genealogy website. It allows members to create their own family websites, share pictures and videos, organize family events, create family trees, and search for ancestors and historical records. With over 64 million users, MyHeritage is one of the largest sites in the social networking and genealogy field. In 2003, CEO Gilad Japhet and a team of genealogy enthusiasts founded MyHeritage in Japhet’s living room in the small town of Bnei Atarot, just...

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