MyHeritage is an online genealogy company with web, mobile, and software products and services, founded in Israel in 2003. Users of the platform can obtain their family trees, upload and browse through photos, and search through over 19.9 billion historical records, among other features. In early 2021 it was acquired by Francisco Partners, an American private equity firm, for $600 million.
As of 2023, the service supported 42 languages. In 2016, it launched a genetic testing service called MyHeritage DNA, with more than 6.5 million DNA kits in the company's database by March 2023.MyHeritage Launches 3rd DNA Quest Initiative to Help Adoptees Find Their Birth Families. Yahoo! Finance The company is headquartered in Or Yehuda, Israel, with additional offices in Tel Aviv, Israel; Lehi, Utah; Kyiv, Ukraine; and Burbank, California.
History 2003–2007: Foundation and early years
MyHeritage was founded in 2003 by Israeli entrepreneur Gilad Japhet (who continues to serve as the company's CEO). Japhet started the company from his living room in Bnei Atarot, Israel. For a long time, the company's headquarters were located in a family farmhouse in Bnei Atarot. In its infancy, MyHeritage was almost completely self-funded but had received funds from angel investors by 2005. It switched from a free service to a freemium business model.
Early on, MyHeritage required users to upload genealogical information from desktop software. The information could be viewed online but could not be altered. In 2006, MyHeritage introduced new features, including facial recognition software that recognized facial features from a database of photographs to link individuals together. In December 2006, the company acquired Pearl Street Software which was the creator of family tree software (Family Tree Legends) and a family tree submission site (GenCircles) with over 160 million profiles and 400 million public records.
By 2007, MyHeritage had 150,000 family trees, 180 million person profiles, 100 million photos, and 17.2 million users worldwide. The service was available in 17 languages. The company also began offering a new web-based feature that allowed users to upload genealogical information directly to the MyHeritage site. MyHeritage had also received a total of US$9 million in investor funding, half of which had come from Accel.
2008–2012: Acquisitions and expansion
In 2008, MyHeritage raised US$15 million from an investment group including Index Ventures and Accel. At that time, the website had grown to 260 million people profiles, 25 million users, 230 million photos, and 25 supported languages. Soon after securing funding, MyHeritage acquired Kindo, a UK-based family tree building service. In 2009, the company released a new version of their free genealogy software, Family Tree Builder, which included the ability to sync between the software and the website.
In 2010, the company acquired Germany-based OSN Group, a family tree website network with seven genealogy sites under its name. Some websites in the OSN network included Verwandt.de in Germany, Moikrewni.pl in Poland, and Dynastree.com in the United States. The acquisition provided MyHeritage with several new features (including coats of arms, family tree merging, and an option to venture into mobile applications) and a total of 540 million people profiles, 47 million active users, and 13 million family trees. In 2011, those numbers increased to 760 million people profiles and 56 million users after MyHeritage acquired Poland-based Bliscy.pl, another genealogy website.
Other 2011 acquisitions included the Dutch family network, Zooof; BackupMyTree, a backup service designed to protect up to 9 terabytes of offline family history data; and FamilyLink, a developer of family history content sites and owner of a large database of historical records (WorldVitalRecords.com, which included census, birth, death, and marriage records along with an archive of historical newspapers). By the end of 2011, MyHeritage had 60 million users, 900 million profiles, 21 million family trees, and was available in 38 different languages. The company also released the first version of its mobile app for iOS and Android devices.
In 2012, MyHeritage surpassed 1 billion people profiles and launched several new features, including SuperSearch, a search engine for billions of historical records, and Record Matching, a technology that automatically compares MyHeritage's historical records to the profiles on the site and alerts users whenever a match is found for a relative in their family tree.
In November 2012, MyHeritage acquired one of its primary competitors, Geni.com. The company kept all of Geni's employees and operated the company as a separate brand in Los Angeles, California, and, as of 2016, MyHeritage and Geni were still separate. Founded by David O. Sacks in 2007, Geni is a genealogy website with the goal of "creating a family tree of the whole world," whereas MyHeritage focuses on records and collecting non-merged individual family trees. The acquisition added 7 million new users to MyHeritage, bringing the total number of members to 72 million. At the time, MyHeritage also had 27 million family trees and 1,5 billion profiles and was available in 40 languages. In addition to the acquisition of Geni, MyHeritage also raised US$25 million in a funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
2013–present: partnerships, further growth, and beyond In 2013, MyHeritage entered into a partnership to allow FamilySearch to use its technologies. At the time of the deal, MyHeritage had 75 million registered users and 1.6 billion people profiles. The company also gained access to all United States census records from 1790 to 1940. In April 2013, MyHeritage released Family Tree Builder 7.0, which included new features like sync, Unicode, and record matches. MyHeritage also introduced a web feature called Record Detective that automatically makes connections between different historical records.
In 2014, MyHeritage announced partnerships and collaborations with other companies and entities. In February 2014, the company partnered with BillionGraves to digitize and document graves and cemeteries worldwide. In October 2014, the company partnered with EBSCO Information Services to provide educational institutions (libraries, universities, etc.) with free access to MyHeritage's database of historical records. In December 2014, MyHeritage entered into an agreement with the Danish National Archives to index census records and parish registers from 1646 to 1930 (a total of around 120 million records). The company also surpassed 5 billion historical records in their database in 2014 and launched the Instant Discoveries feature, which enables users to add whole branches of relatives to their family tree at once.
In 2015, MyHeritage reached 6.3 billion historical records, 200 million photographs, 80 million registered users, and availability in 42 languages. It also released the Global Name Translation technology, which automatically translates names from different languages to make searching for ancestors more efficient.
In March 2016, employees of MyHeritage recorded and preserved the family history of remote peoples in the Highlands Region of Papua New Guinea.
In August 2017, the company acquired Millennia Corp. and its Legacy Family Tree software and Legacy webinars program.
In 2018, the company announced its sponsorship of the Eurovision Song Contest 2019. It also announced that, as of October 2018, the total number of historical records reached over 9 billion. Also in 2018, chief science officer Yaniv Erlich received media attention for creating a family tree of 13 million people using data from Geni.com.
On September 7, 2019, MyHeritage announced that they had acquired both SNPedia and Promethease. All non-European raw genetic data files previously uploaded to Promethease, and not deleted by users by November 1, 2019, are to be copied to the MyHeritage website into new user accounts that will be created for them, these accounts will receive free services like ethnicity estimates and DNA matching for relatives.
In April 2019, MyHeritage changed the autosomal DNA microarray chip from the Infinium OmniExpress chip to the Infinium GSA chip, with 642,824 markers.
In early 2021, MyHeritage was acquired by Francisco Partners for a reported $600 million. In August that year, MyHeritage announced the acquisition of the French-based genealogy platform Filae, in a deal valued at €31.1 million.Genealogy platform MyHeritage buys French rival Filae. Globes
In March 2024, MyHeritage launched a subscription-based newspaper archive website similar to other sites like Newspapers.com, and NewspaperArchive named OldNews. In October 2024, MyHeritage acquired MesAieux.com a French-Canadian genealogy website.
In October 2025, MyHeritage announced the transition from its older genotyping array technology to Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) and that it would complete this upgrade by the end of 2025.
Security incidents In June 2018, it was announced that MyHeritage experienced a security breach that leaked the data of over 92 million users. According to the company, the breach occurred on October 26, 2017. The leak allowed the users' email addresses and hashed passwords to be compromised. MyHeritage stated that information about family trees, DNA profiles, and credit card information is stored on a separate system and was not part of the leak. The company notified customers on the day it discovered the breach and implemented two-factor authentication with support for text or app authentication as a response. In February 2019, the data from the breach appeared for sale on the dark web, along with account data from a number of other websites.
Investigative genetic genealogy Investigative genetic genealogy (IGG, or forensic genetic genealogy) is a process whereby law enforcement uses a public genealogy database to identify a suspect in a criminal investigation. Once a lab extracts a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) profile from an unknown suspect's DNA, the data file is then uploaded to a public genetic genealogy database. A list of partial DNA matches is generated from the users who uploaded their own DNA data files into the database; investigators can then use that list of matches and public records to build a family tree that leads to the suspect.
The MyHeritage terms and conditions and privacy policy currently prohibit database use by law enforcement, a restriction that was codified after the company became aware of the database's use in a criminal investigation. The company also prohibits the creation of fictitious user profiles; however, because the database allows for users to upload DNA data files generated by other companies, investigators have had the means to use the database in homicide investigations.
People of California v. Joseph James DeAngelo (2018) The most high-profile instance of IGG occurred in the investigation into the serial killings and rapes committed by someone nicknamed the Golden State Killer, who was eventually identified through IGG as Joseph James DeAngelo.
Initial reports indicated that DeAngelo was identified as a suspect through GEDmatch, and both FamilyTreeDNA and MyHeritage denied involvement in the DeAngelo case. But the chief executive of FamilyTreeDNA later told the Wall Street Journal that he gave law enforcement permission to use the database without knowing the case under investigation. The Los Angeles Times reported that when investigators were unsatisfied with the leads generated by both GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, they utilized the MyHeritage database.