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.

MyHeritage has a simple goal: to help people discover who they are related to and help maintain these connections. The company’s Smart Matching technology takes data entered in and matches info with other family trees and data that people have entered in to the site to find relatives and explore their family history.

The site also offers a private home on the web for exploring family history and keeping in touch; allowing users to create their own family website, share pictures and videos, organize family events, create family trees and discover ancestors and long-lost relatives.

Backed by Accel and Index Ventures, MyHeritage.com boasts an international registered member base of 60 million users, offers its services in 38 languages, and is home to more than 900 million profiles and 21 million family trees. And the company is profitable.

For the company, Utah-based FamilyLink furthers MyHeritage’s presence in the US.>, and boosts MyHeritage’s offering to families with the addition of a database of more than 3 billion historical records.

Founded in 2006, both FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com are subscription services which provide access to a huge database of historical content, covering several billion individuals within census, birth, marriage and death records, as well as the web’s largest archive of historical newspapers.

With offices and staff in Europe, Australia and Israel; MyHeritage will now be adding its first US-based office in Utah, the home of FamilyLink.com.

As MyHeritage founder and CEO Gilad Japhet says, “We’ll be able to find your mother’s yearbook, your great- grandfather’s will and your ancestor’s immigration record…We’ll do that on a massive, global scale, as we live in a world
that is smaller and more tightly connected than ever before”.

The CEO of FamilyLink.com, Paul Brockbank, previously CEO of Logoworks and GM of Hewlett Packard Web Print Solutions, will later join the MyHeritage advisory board. FamilyLink.com founder Paul Allen, previously a co-founder of Ancestry.com, will not be part of the merger with MyHeritage.

MyHeritage faces competition from the less social Ancestry.com, which is more US focused. But most people’s deep family trees span languages and borders. And while MyHeritage has a big global audience, FamilyLink should help the company broaden its user base in the U.S.

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.

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: Discovering who you are related to. 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. MyHeritage is hoping to jumpstart some developer love by launching a competition for the best family app, with a $10,000 prize. The competition starts September 1. Some obvious ideas are event planning and Tshirts for family reunions or family-only photo sharing apps.

You may wonder why MyHeritage is only now getting around to launching an API, given that most social media companies have had API-fever for years. MyHeritage has always come at its business  from more of a genealogy-nerd point of view than a Silicon Valley Web developer point of view. Indeed, several acquisitions the company has made in recent years were done to get more of that sexy Web 2.0 DNA into the company.

But late or not, it seems to have played the balance right. The gorgeously designed Geni didn’t take off as fast as investors hoped, while the far less social Ancestry.com– which relies more heavily on official data and still doesn’t have an API– has lacked some of MyHeritage’s viral qualities.

As we’ve written before, a huge advantage for MyHeritage is its global focus, something it may not have cultivated if it had been born in the Silicon Valley in-crowd. Ancestry.com is far more US focused and most people’s deep family trees span languages and boarders. Not only does MyHeritage have a big global audience, it’s available in 38 languages. Some of this has been organic, but the company has been aggressively acquiring leading genealogy sites along the way as well.

Don’t expect this to be the last announcement the company makes this year.

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.

The move follows the company’s acquisition of several other family networks in 2010, including OSN and its Polish site MoiKrewni.pl. Merging Bliscy.pl with MyHeritage.pl, the Polish website of MyHeritage.com, essentially unites Poland’s two competing family history sites.

The company basically enables people to explore their family history, share photos and to keep in touch with relatives online.

So why the focus on Poland? As Europe’s sixth largest economy, MyHeritage.com points out, Poland is an economic power house within Central Europe, possessing more than 40 percent of 500 of the region’s largest companies measured by turnover. The country has a GDP growth rate that ranks amongst the highest within the European Union.

The number of ethnic Poles living abroad is estimated to be some 20 million, with the largest concentrations of 10 million and 1.6 million living in the USA and Germany.

Over 2.6 million Polish users are now on MyHeritage.com.

The family tree data, including more than 6.5 million family tree profiles created by more than half a million Bliscy.pl users, will be moved onto private family sites on MyHeritage.com in July 2011, subject to user approval.

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

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.

This was a big job because each profile has a lot of bits and pieces attached to it and there was only a 5% overlap in accounts. That may be a sign that MyHeritage wasn’t doing so hot in Europe, proving this was a smart deal.

MyHeritage has an algorithm that helps find family tree connections for users, so it should be interesting to see how this influx of European users expands existing users’ family trees in the coming weeks. “A huge amount of people in North America are going to discover unknown roots,” MyHeritage founder Gilad Japhet says.

I visited Japhet the last time I was in Israel  and we chatted about the merger over the weekend. He wouldn’t disclose whether the deal was stock or cash or how much he paid, but it was clear that he was eying OSN for some time. “It was founded by two very talented individuals, and I knew from their track record they were serial entrepreneurs,” he says. “I thought from the start they wouldn’t have the patience to run this for ten years, maybe they’d be willing to merge their vision with ours. Eventually that theory proved correct.”

Japhet is not playing around. It won’t come as a surprise to anyone whose spent time in Israel if I tell you he’s intense, competitive, and relentlessly determined. Post-deal, MyHeritage is far beyond most genealogy competitors with the exception of Ancestry.com, which started in 1983, has spent some $80 million acquiring census information and went public last year.

But there’s a key difference: MyHeritage is more about living family members, and Ancestry.com is more focused on, well, ancestors. So in practice the companies are far different. There’s more interaction, communication, and photo and video sharing on MyHeritage because—bluntly put—more of the profile-owners are alive. Last Saturday when Japhet and I talked, 1 million photos had already been uploaded to the site that day. “There is a clear need for families to have a secure and private place online to share memories, stay in touch and preserve their history,” says Saul Klein, partner at Index Ventures and a MyHeritage board member. “I think the further Facebook opens up to the real-time web and defaults to public, the greater this need will become.”

Indeed privacy is a big issue to Japhet, even if it means slower growth. Unlike competing sites, if you chose to be public on MyHeritage, only your information goes public, not the details of your siblings, nieces, nephews and other members of your family tree.

This is less about beating other genealogy sites now and more about MyHeritage making up the third leg of the social networking stool, which is still largely up for grabs. Facebook has won on friends, LinkedIn has won on professional and MyHeritage is seeking to win on family. It took LinkedIn far longer to get to critical mass because professional relationships were less viral and sexy, and my guess is family relationships may take even longer. Indeed, MyHeritage started six years ago and is still largely unknown in the high-brow Valley circles.

But eventually it’s a huge opportunity, and Japhet is patient. His site has those same endorphin-rush elements of discovery and connection that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have. But here’s kicker—it has to be international to work because the US, Israel, and much of the world are essentially young nations with huge immigrant melting pots communities. You can’t trace distant cousins too far back, if you’re only going to focus on the US. And you only get those moments of true “holy-shit!” joy when other trees start connecting to yours and you discover whole new branches. If you’re just entering your known-relatives, it’s not too exciting.

Don’t expect this to be MyHeritage’s last acquisition. Japhet borderline stalks competitors. He can rattle off any stat from Ancestry.com’s public filings and viewed Geni’s 2007 launch as a huge wake up call for better UI and features. Japhet knew a lot about genealogy, but MyHeritage was a wonky, tech-heavy download before Geni’s beautifully simple site launched—and got a whopping $100 million valuation. Later, when Japhet saw OSN’s faster growth in Europe, he knew he had to have them.

Japhet says OSN didn’t have a deep understanding of genealogy, but they killed it on features, many of which MyHeritage will be keeping. Among other things OSN had an iPhone app, operated in 14 different languages, and offered poster printing of family trees in any size. “There’s nothing like German engineering,” Japhet says. [Update: Originally I wrote "40 languages" which is what I heard via our Skype connection.]

Japhet’s favorite feature is the coat of arms. If you don’t have one, you can create your own, and it appears on all your pages—you can even order merchandise bearing your new coat of arms. The site will soon allow you to register it with the coat of arms authorities– a big hit with its European audience.  When designing his own coat of arms, Japhet was a bit put off by the dragons and swords and instead asked an engineer to design some chess pieces. Yep, tech geeks are the same in every country.

Is all of this making MyHeritage a target for someone like Ancestry.com? “I’d like to say we’re too expensive for them,” Japhet said. MyHeritage has raised $24 million to date and started to focus on revenues last year. It’s profitable now, making money through ecommerce transactions and premium services. MyHeritage has been funded by some of the strongest investors in Europe including Index and Accel.

That’s ultimately the thing I find most exciting about Japhet and MyHeritage—he wants to build a billion dollar business, and he’s not put off by how long that will take or by the rap that Israelis are great at enterprise, but bad at the consumer Internet. Japhet himself wasn’t naturally great at it, but he’s benefited mightily from his competitors who were and moved quickly to compensate—whether it’s learning from them or buying them.

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. (Think: sending flowers and candy to your parents for their anniversary). Japhet admits the company should have focused on this earlier, but says the lean operation should be break-even by the end of the year.

After a tour, Japhet said, “How long do you have? Because when I get going, it’s hard to stop.” He’s not kidding. He also took the liberty of giving me a bigger notepad. I think I asked one question, but mostly nodded and ate the homey selection of apples, pears and bananas that was laid out for us. But I’m not sure there’s anyway to tell the story of MyHeritage quickly. It’s been a long road and little has come easily for this company. As a result, more than a few people have described Japhet as a little crazy. That’s ok. I like crazy entrepreneurs. Frequently, you have to be one to succeed.

After all, when he started MyHeritage no one was interested in a mainstream Web genealogy startup. He bootstrapped the company for years, mortgaging his house and begging a German company for free access to its facial recognition software. He was turned down for venture capital so many times, when he finally got a small round from prominent Israeli angels, he had to give up a lot of equity. “Have you ever heard this word ‘Chutzpah?’” he asked smiling.

It’s not that Japhet is modest: He clearly crowed over MyHeritage’s technology and other things he believes he’s done well. But he openly admits where he has struggled. One of the most pivotal events in his company’s history: The launch and monster $100 million valuation of competing site Geni.com. On one hand, it legitimized the space. But as his investor Simon Levene of Accel told him, “Be careful what happened to MetaCafe doesn’t happen to you.”

The story of MetaCafe is one you hear over-and-over again in Israel. The company is still alive, but the founders have left, traffic has stalled, and according to Arrington at least, acquisition attempts were thwarted. In case you aren’t familiar with MetaCafe, it was a lot like YouTube, only it launched earlier. It was growing nicely when, like an Israeli cabbie, YouTube came out of nowhere and sideswiped MetaCafe. (Yes, I’m trying to make Israeli driving jokes in every post about the country. I’m actually a big fan of the taxi drivers here. I’ve arrived at meetings in record speed over the last two weeks.)

If I’ve heard about the so-called MetaCafe curse at least two dozen  times since I’ve arrived, no doubt Japhet has heard about it more. After six years of building this company, putting a strain on his family and having to give away most of his equity to keep it alive, Levene’s words were like a call to action. “He didn’t say we were going to lose,” Japhet says. “He said, ‘You’re going to work really, really hard to make sure you win.’” And as TechCrunch has reported, MyHeritage is killing Geni in traffic, and buzz-wise everyone seems more excited about Geni founder David Sacks’ newer company, Yammer. Japhet likes Yammer too. “David Sacks is a very talented guy and now I only have to compete with half of him,” he says.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Geni’s user interface, and it’s still better. But MyHeritage gives you more to do. While everyone in Israel has been in a lather about Face.com this week, MyHeritage has long had pretty impressive facial recognition software that could also tag photos on Facebook, Flickr and other sites. Again, Face.com is glitzier, but at least Japhet knows this is a weakness. This is the real reason he bought the UK’s Kindo recently. “They didn’t have a ton of assets, but they were good at UI,” he says.

It’s been a tough road for Japhet. Maybe he built the company too early. Maybe he should have focused more on the Web than a downloadable client. Maybe he should have focused more on revenues a few years ago. But there’s also an advantage when things don’t come easily for entrepreneurs: They take nothing for granted and are less likely to get sideswiped by an upstart.

So why would a service with 25 million users would care for a small player? Probably to extend its presence in Europe with an existing team and have a plug and play service in 14 languages but also to have a comparable technology and product asset with its main new challengers: Geni.com et Verwandt (in Germany). Kindo’s product is nicely done (see below for yourself) and even better than MyHeritage’s own service. It makes sense to think that both services will merge at some point. [Update: TechCrunch UK has more on this].

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=3329178269245588621&hl=un&fs=true

Kindo was funded by TAG and Ambient Sound Investment (a fund created by ex Skype engineers)

update: it didn’t strike me when i first wrote this post but Saul Klein is both an investor in Kindo (with TAG) and in MyHeritage (with Index). I assume he was a key facilitator in that deal. If you add to that his ex position at Skype, you end up understanding that the web is a really small family, which in this case is obviously helpful (no play on words)

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.

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.

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 people in the world is just a mouse click away.

It’s a grand vision, but one that is likely to be achieved someday by MyHeritage or one of their competitors.

As an aside, MyHeritage also has a robust (and free) genealogy metasearch engine that taps into 1200 genealogy databases around the world.

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.