Israeli company MyHeritage, which operates a huge family-based social network has acquired FamilyLink, the developer behind family history
content sites FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com.
While financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, this is MyHeritage’s seventh and largest acquisition since 2007. Past acquisitions include Germany’s OSN, Poland’s Bliscy.pl, Dutch Family Network ZOOOF and most recently BackupMyTree. → Read More
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. → 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 sites like MyHeritage and Geni: Discovery. MyHeritage is enabling more than 20 million new “Smart Matches” a month.
Today it’s announcing its Family Graph API to enable more developers to build family-oriented apps on top of this unique set of connections. → Read More
MyHeritage.com, a relatively heavily-funded Israeli startup operating a huge family-based social network, has moved to acquire Bliscy.pl from Poland’s Internet publishing company Wirtualna Polska to solidify its position in the Polish family history market.
The acquisition translates to growth of MyHeritage’s family network to 56 million registered users and roughly 760 million profiles. → Read More
Israeli genealogy site MyHeritage has completed its third acquisition, buying Germany’s OSN. OSN operates seven genealogy sites including Verwandt.de in Germany, Moikrewni.pl in Poland and Dynastree.com in the US. It was launched in 2007 just after LA-based Geni and, at first, it was just your typical German clone. But it added features and grew fast in older European markets like Germany and Poland, and even emerging markets like Brazil. In a clone-rarity, OSN grew twice as fast as Geni in the early days according to TechCrunch.
The merger gives MyHeritage a lot of new features and a whopping combined 540 million profiles, 47 million active users and 13 million family trees. The companies have been quietly merging the sites together for the last few weeks, and all of OSN’s information, profiles, family trees and pictures should be all live on MyHeritage, as of about thirty minutes ago. → Read More
BNEI ATAROT- In case you don’t recognize it, that dateline is the name of a small village about forty-five minutes from Tel Aviv. Don’t worry, my concierge hadn’t heard of it either. It may actually have more roosters than people living there. But tucked away, in a hundred-year-old house built by German Templars is one of the most exciting Web companies in Israel: MyHeritage. It’s also completely outside of the Israeli Web “scene.” I’ve never seen founder Gilad Japhet at any of the Web mixers, and I’ve never gotten a pitch from his PR people. In fact, I had to do a bit of hounding to get a meeting.
But don’t be fooled by the low-profile: MyHeritage is boasting some of the best numbers of any Israeli Web startup. It’s got 31 million registered users, who have documented 330 million family members, some living and some dead. The company has been backed by blue chip investors Accel Partners and Index Ventures. And Japhet told me on Monday, the company is starting to bring in real revenue from premium services and eCommerce transactions. → Read More
Israeli based MyHeritage, recently funded by Accel and Index Ventures is acquiring UK based, Kindo.com a family tree service. The amount of the acquisition is not announced but given Kindo’s performance (according to Google trends) we assume this was not a big operation. We can assume also that part of the recent funding was dedicated to the acquisition. → Read More
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. → 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 growing at nearly twice the rate that Geni is. In Verwandt’s first five months, CEO Sven Schmidt says they have spread to six languages (German, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English). One million family trees and 9.5 million profiles have been created (4.5 million more profiles than Geni’s first five months). They’ve cannibalized a lot of early adopters in the Europe and South America with strong execution in localized markets and languages. Verwandt is even taking on Geni on its home turf. They’ve just launched in the U.S. under the domain ItsOurTree. Same design, different words. Geni’s simple Flash interface was an innovation among genealogical sites (see our coverage of established competitors like MyHeritage and Ancestry.com). Verwandt is nothing more than a blatant rip of of Geni. But they are executing perfectly, and those 9.5 million user profiles are likely gone for Geni forever. Verwandt’s success means other clones will pop up even quicker than befoe. And that means startups need to think about international strategies right at the start, perhaps even before launch and before the application is proven. CrunchBase Information Geni Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Israeli startup MyHeritage was a bit of a sleeping giant. Until newcomer Geni came along and shook up the genealogy world with its slick new viral family tree application. Geni quickly reached 5 million people profiles and a monster $100 million valuation just a few months after launching. MyHeritage has been around since 2005. They’ve quietly raised $9 million in venture capital (about half from Accel and half from two angel investors, Yuval Rakavy and Aviv Raiz). Until recently MyHeritage required users to upload family genealogy information from desktop based software. The information was viewable online but no changes could be made. An unwieldy system, but they still managed to gather 150,000 family trees with 180 million people profiles from 17.2 million users. 150,000 new profiles are added daily. That dwarfs Geni, although MyHeritage had a long head start. A couple of weeks ago MyHeritage unveiled a number of fundamental architectural changes to their service. They’ve taken the best features of Geni and married them to the stuff at My Heritage that has worked over the past couple of years. Users can now upload data (name, email, born/died dates, photos, etc.) directly on the MyHeritage website in addition to the client, choosing from17 different languages. The user interface, which like Geni is in Flash, shows a couple of different views to quickly move around a family tree. Over 100 million photos have been uploaded to the site, and users can tag faces with names an attach them to user profiles. That isn’t all MyHeritage is up to, though. They acquired Pearl Street Software late last year. That acquisition brought matching technology to the company which allows the service to compare family trees to find overlap – even if names are spelled differently or the basic data is somewhat off (slightly different birth or death dates, for example). They are just beginning to roll out the matching service, but they expect to see a lot of overlap between family trees. If both sides agree, the trees can be merged at appropriate places. MyHeritage hopes, like Geni, to one day have much of the world’s genealogy mapped online. Given that 1 billion people are online today, MyHeritage’s 180 million people profiles is a good starts towards reaching that goal. They eventually hope to have 3 billion profiles, including people who’ve passed away. And at that point the family relationship between any two → Read More
Genealogy site MyHeritage is merging with Pearl Street Software. Through the team-up MyHeritage will pick up Pearl Street’s VP of Technology and gain control of the #2 family tree software in worldwide sales (Family Tree Legends), the #2 family tree submission site (GenCircles) with more than 160 million ancestors, and more than 400 million public records in the Family Tree Legends Records Collection. The addition of the team and products put the company in a better position to deal with upstart Geni, which announced over 5 million profiles in 5 months in July. They’ve also been getting a great deal of the press. However, Geni still has a long way to go when taking on the established ancestry industry. MyHeritage has a large lead on the site with over 10 million registered users of their site. Ancestry.com, the leading genealogy site, has added 5.6 million people to their family trees this week. As a sign of the competition, MyHeritage will now be making all the Pearl Street Software free. Update: This acquisition actually took place in December 2006 but was not announced until now. Integrtation been ongoing since that time. → Read More
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