A big day for online genealogy sites: MyHeritage, an Israel-based site that lets people research and their family histories and make family trees, has raised $25 million in new funding, and it has bought out one of its rivals, Geni.com — the company that originally begat Yammer, which now owned by Microsoft. The purchase was an eight-figure deal in cash and equity, according to MyHeritage… → Read More
Genealogy website Ancestry.com — which filed for an IPO back in 2009 — has agreed to be acquired by an investor group led by European private equity firm Permira in a deal said to be worth about $1.6 billion, or $32 per share, the Wall Street Journal is reporting. The paper cites “people familiar with the matter” who point to expansion in Western Europe as a goal. → Read More
Utah-based genealogy site Ancestry.com just announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Silicon Valley-based startup Inflection to acquire its competitor Archives.com for $100 million is cash and assumed liabilities. Inflection’s other product, people search public records site PeopleSmart, is not part of this acquisition. A number of Archive.com’s employees, including some of… → Read More
MyHeritage, Israel’s best hope of having a big Web 2.0 winner, keeps marching along, leaving Geni further in the dust and proving a surging challenger for already-public Ancestry.com.
The company has nearly 60 million registered users, who have uploaded 20 million family trees, 800 million profiles and 125 million photos on the site. All of that inventory is helping fulfill the early promise of… → Read More
No, we’re not becoming a celebrity blog (yet) but the noteworthy thing is that it’s incredibly hard for technology companies to even buy this kind of publicity: Ancestry.com researchers have found that actress Ellen DeGeneres is apparently related to pop star Madonna.
Genealogists employed by the company, which offers a subscription-based Web service that allows people to study families and the… → Read More
Another small sign that the worst of the recession may be behind us: IPO registrations are clawing their way back from the shadow of the valley of death (also known as the first quarter if 2009, when there were zero IPOs registered with the SEC). So far in July and August alone there have been 14 IPOs, as many as in the previous three quarters combined. These numbers and the chart above are… → Read More
After going a year with nary a venture-backed IPO in sight, here’s more proof that things are finally beginning to perk up: Ancestry.com, a genealogy service that allows user to map out and search for their family history, has filed for a $75 million IPO. You can see the full SEC filing here.
Ancestry.com offers some basic functionality for free, but to tap into the site’s vast library of… → Read More
Family genealogy and social newtork Geni got to five million profiles in the first five months after launch. Their early growth propelled them to a $100 million valuation and a lot of positive press. In August the inevitable German clone launched. The clone, called Verwandt.de is a near carbon copy of Geni. But unlike most clones, which never do as well as the original application, Verwandt is… → Read More
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