MyHeritage snaps up Geni; raises $25M

Geni's thesis is to make a world family tree, will use MyHeritage's global reach to achieve goal

I moved to the Bay Area in January of this year, and spent my first three months in my new city unemployed and living in a hotel, answering job ads all day.

That kind of thing can become mind numbing after a while, as I’m sure at least some of you know, so you have to find ways to distract yourself. One of the things I started to do was find old family records on Ancestry.com. I found all of these cool old documents about my family history, including my great grandmother’s naturalization papers, which led me to find a picture of the ship that she took to get to America in the early part of the 1900s. It was pretty exciting to find all of this information about family that I had never met.

I have to say, though, that I was kind of disappointed that it was harder to find records from overseas. I was able to create a tree of my family once they were in America, but everything before that was too hard to find.

That's where a company like Geni comes in handy. The service, whose mission it to make a global family tree, has been purchased by MyHeritage, a genealogy website much like Ancestry.com, it was announced Wednesday. At the same time, MyHeritage also announced that it had raised $25 million in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), with existing investors Index Ventures, Accel Partners and Hasso Plattner Ventures also participating.

The money will be used to "boost growth of our historical content services, expand commercial operations worldwide, acquire significant record collections from Europe and roll out global crowd-sourcing projects."

While terms of the deal between MyHeritage and Geni not been disclosed, Geni, which raised $16.5 million since being founded in 2006, will continue to operate as a separate company, and will remain in its current base in Los Angeles. 

In an interview with VatorNews, Geni CEO Noah Tutak said that Geni’s thesis is to “grow the family tree of the world.” And by becoming part of the MyHeritage team will help the company get closer to that goal.

MyHeritage offered two big incentives, he told me. One, the access to a trove of historical records, which will give Geni access to a more global audience. Geni will now be able to automatically match data to My Heritage’s data collection by adding MyHeritage’s Smart Matching technology. It  will automatically search over 1 billion MyHeritage profiles to help users add new branches to theur  tree and discover new relatives.

In addition, MyHeritage gives Geni users the ability to create private trees that are not connected to the larger world tree.

As for what MyHeritage gets out of the deal, Tutak says that it get access to the “leader in the world tree concept.”

In the long term, he said, he thinks that there will be one collection that every person will access, much like Wikipedia. Once the data is collected in one place, it cannot be replaced. And Geni will be the one to power that service.

MyHeritage, which is based in Israel, also gets access to Geni’s nearly 8 million users, and a presence in the United States.

"We bought Geni.com to expand the users and data on MyHeritage, to add Geni.com’s talented workforce to our team, to add the technologies they have built to our assets, and to continue our mission of helping families everywhere build their family tree and research and share their family history online," MyHeritage wrote in a blogpost.

"With Geni.com’s focus on collaborative family history and the fact they, like us, have users from around the world, we’ll be able to bring even more innovation and powerful tools and services to family history lovers everywhere."

Geni has already announced a slew of changes that it will be making in conjunction with the news.

There will be more tree limits, meaning that users can add unlimited profiles for free. This will help people grow their trees faster. Geni will also now make the profiles of all living relative private.

Also, users can now download a high quality chart of their family tree to their computer for free, so that they can send them to their relatives. Geni is also going to be ad free from now on.

More changes will be coming in the next few months, Geni says.

Ancestry.com

Of course, no mention of family tree and genealogy services would be complete without mentioning what Tutak calls “the gorilla of the industry": Ancestry.com

So what makes a company like Geni think it can compete with a service like Ancestry, which was recently purchased by private equity group Permira for $1.6 billion?

Tutak says that he thinks Geni and MyHeritage are better than Ancestry, simply because they are more social.

Both companies, he said, were founded in the mid 2000s, right in the era of social marketing and social networking. Ancestry, which was launched in 1997, came well before that and has never gotten up to speed.

In addition, Tutak also says that Geni and MyHeritage will be stronger internationally. Ancestry is known for its record collections, which may not exist in other countries.

Ancestry, which filed for a $75 million IPO in 2009, purchased photo digitizing startup 1000memories earlier this month. In April, the company acquired Archives.com, a publicly-traded genealogy company, for $100 million.

(Image source: https://www.geni.com)