Ancestry.com buys Archives.com for $100M

Leading genealogy service with 1.8M subs scoops up smaller rival

(Updated: To include comments from Ancestry.com CEO Tim Sullivan)

Ancestry.com, a publicly-traded genealogy company with a $1 billion market cap, announced late Wednesday that it's buying privately-held Archive.com, a provider of similar family-history services, for about $100 million in cash and assumed liabilities. 

Archives.com is owned by Silicon Valley-based Inflection, which was founded in 2006, and has never raised any venture capital. Archives.com launched in 2010 and currently has more than 380,000 paying subscribers paying $39.95 a year to access more than 2.1 billion historical records, including birth records, obituaries, immigration and passenger lists, historical newspapers, and U.S. and U.K. Censuses. 

"Adding Archives.com to our product line allows Ancestry to offer family history customers more choices.  We believe Archives.comprovides Ancestry with a differentiated value offering that will bring new customers to Ancestry," said Tim Sullivan, CEO of Ancestry.com, in an interview.

"We estimate that approximately 40% of Archives' content does not overlap with Ancestry.com content," Sullivan added.

Ancestry.com, which has more than 1.8 million paying subscribers and has more than nine billion records about 34 million family trees and four billion profiles, plans to operate Archives.com separately and plans to keep multiple Inflection employees.  

Archives.com founders Matthew and Brian Monahan will be staying with Inflection.