MyHeritage acquires Geni.com and raises $25m in new funding round
Family history network buys rival and advances international expansion with new funds
LOS ANGELES, California, PROVO, Utah &
TEL AVIV, Israel – November 28, 2012 – MyHeritage, the popular online family history network, announced
today it has acquired long-time rival Geni.com and closed a new USD$25M funding
round led by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), with existing investors Index
Ventures and Accel Partners also participating. Geni.com
Founder David Sacks and BVP Partner Adam Fisher are joining the MyHeritage
Board of Directors.
The acquisition reinforces MyHeritage’s
position as a global power player in the family history industry and
accelerates its vision of helping families everywhere build and share their
legacy online. The purchase of Geni.com is the eighth and largest acquisition
made by MyHeritage since the launch of its online family history network in
2005. It extends MyHeritage’s network to 72 million registered users, 1.5
billion profiles and 27 million family trees, containing the most
internationally diverse family history content in the world.
The new investment round will be used by
MyHeritage to boost growth of its historical content services and expand commercial
operations worldwide. In addition to acquiring significant record collections
from Europe and rolling out global crowd-sourcing projects, the funds will
enable MyHeritage to explore additional M&A opportunities and ramp up its international
marketing operations. The latest funding round brings the total funds raised so
far by MyHeritage to USD$49 million.
“Exploring and curating one's family past is
both a timeless and universal hobby pursued by hundreds of millions of people
around the world; I personally grew my own family tree to include more than
2,500 people,” said BVP Partner Adam Fisher. “The freemium model of
MyHeritage/Geni not only makes online family history accessible to the casual
user, but underscores the importance of user generated data to the product
offering itself, which grows every day. As the international market leader with
an aggressive expansion plan, we see tremendous value in their subscription
business and are excited to work closely with Gilad and his team as they
build on their success.”
“Today’s news is a major turning-point for
the family history industry, giving us significant new resources to extend our
market leadership and deliver new value to families worldwide,” said Founder
and CEO of MyHeritage, Gilad Japhet. “Well established as an innovative and
social brand, Geni.com is a natural addition to MyHeritage and together we look
forward to taking collaborative family history to new heights. Over the past few years our dedicated workforce
has transformed MyHeritage from a garage start-up into a successful, dynamic
and global company. With new funds, impressive new talent from Geni.com and new
world-class leaders on our Board, we look forward to fulfilling our potential
and accomplishing our mission to bring family history to the masses.”
Founded in 2007, Geni.com is well known as a
pioneer in collaborative family tree building with its focus on creating the World
Family Tree, and enjoys a large following in the US. Geni.com will continue to
operate as a separate brand based out of its California office, which will also
serve as the main engineering hub for MyHeritage in the US, alongside its main
content offices in Utah. The entire staff at Geni.com will join the MyHeritage
team.
The services of MyHeritage and Geni.com will initially
run independently. MyHeritage plans to give respective users the option to
collaborate on family history research by enabling two-way information flows between
the sites that will facilitate new family discoveries and provide greater value
to the users of both services.
Users from both sites will be able to discover
long-lost relatives and new ancestral connections through MyHeritage’s Smart
Matching
technology, which
finds common matches between family trees. To add new color to the ancestries
of Geni.com users, MyHeritage will apply its recently launched Record Matching™
technology that matches historical records, such as birth, death, census and
immigration records, to individuals in Geni.com family trees. Geni.com users
will be able to enjoy extended offerings provided by MyHeritage including DNA
kits for genetic genealogy.
Geni.com Founder, David Sacks, a renowned entrepreneur,
and most recently the Founder and CEO of Yammer (sold to Microsoft in June 2012 for $1.2 billion), will take
a seat on the Board of Directors. David’s contributions as a visionary in the
family history field, combined with his sharp eye for product, make him a strategic
addition to MyHeritage management.
“What we've learned over the years building
Geni is that there are three key assets that customers want in the genealogy
space: records, private trees, and the world family tree. This deal brings
together all of these pieces to form the most complete offering in the
genealogy space. Together with MyHeritage, we look forward to continuing Geni's
mission of connecting humanity through a single family tree”, said Founder of
Geni.com David Sacks.
-ends-
About MyHeritage
MyHeritage is a family history network
helping millions of families around the world discover and share their legacy
online. Pioneers in making family history a collaborative experience for the entire
family, MyHeritage empowers its users with innovative social tools and a
massive library of historical content. The site is available in 38 languages. For
more information visit www.myheritage.com
Press Contact
Daniel Horowitz Schelly Talalay Dardashti Mark Olsen
Chief Genealogist US Genealogy Advisor Affiliate Manager
MyHeritage.com MyHeritage.com MyHeritage.com
Daniel@MyHeritage.com (505) 994.1554 (801)
687.0599
About Geni.com
Geni is an online community of casual and
expert family historians working together to create a single World Family Tree.
Members can invite relatives to help them build their own family tree by adding
profile information, documents, photos and videos. They can then discover how
they are related to celebrities, historical figures and other members of the
World Family Tree. It was founded by David Sacks, the original chief
operating officer of PayPal and founder of Yammer, Inc. www.geni.com
About Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) is a global venture
capital firm with offices in Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Mass., New York, Mumbai
and Herzliya, Israel. BVP delivers the broadest platform in venture capital
spanning across industries, geographies, generations and stages of company
growth. From Staples to Skype, VeriSign to Yelp, LinkedIn to Pinterest, BVP has
helped incubate and support companies that have anchored tidal shifts in the
economy. More than 100 BVP-funded companies have gone public on exchanges in
North America, Europe, and Asia. www.bvp.com
About Index Ventures
Index Ventures is a leading global venture capital firm
active in technology and biotechnology investing since 1996. From its offices
in Geneva, London and San Francisco, Index Ventures loves to discover and support
the most entrepreneurial teams wherever they are looking to
build market defining global businesses. For more information on its investments, from seed through to growth stage, please visit www.indexventures.com.
build market defining global businesses. For more information on its investments, from seed through to growth stage, please visit www.indexventures.com.
About Accel Partners
Founded in 1983, Accel Partners has a long history
of partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build
world-class businesses. Accel today invests globally using dedicated
teams and market-specific strategies for local geographies, with offices
in Palo Alto, London, New York City and Bangalore, as well as in China via
its partnership with IDG-Accel. Accel has invested in over 500
companies, many of which have defined their categories, including
Angry Birds (Rovio), ComScore, Facebook, Groupon, Kayak, Playfish,
QlikTech, Spotify, and Wonga. For more information, visit the Accel
Partners web site at www.accel.com find
us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/accel.
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