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MyHeritage, the popular online family history
network, announced today that it has acquired Geni.com,
a pioneer in collaborative family tree building with its focus on creating the World
Family Tree.

The acquisition extends MyHeritage’s network to 72 million registered users, 1.5 billion
profiles and 27 million family trees internationally.

Geni.com will continue to operate as a separate brand based out of its California
office, and 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.

Users of both sites will be able to discover relatives and new ancestral connections
through MyHeritage’s Smart Matching technology, which finds common matches between
family trees. In addition, MyHeritage will apply its recently launched Record Matching
technology—matching historical records such as birth, death, census and immigration
records—to individuals in Geni.com family trees.

In addition to its acquisition, MyHeritage also announced its $25 million funding
round to be used to boost growth of its historical content services and expand its
commercial operations worldwide.

UPDATED: Geni CEO Noah Tutak announces immediate benefits to Geni.com
users:

• Free unlimited profile adding—All users can add as many profiles as they’d
  like to their tree without upgrading to a paid account. There are no limits to the
  size of a user’s tree.
• Free Merging—All users can now merge duplicate profiles in their tree (privacy
  and permission rules still apply).
• Free relationship paths—Users can discover their relationship to historical
  figures and celebrities, and even distant relatives.
• Free family tree chart downloads—All users can now download a high-quality
  chart of their family tree to their computer at no charge. 
• No ads—Ads have been removed to provide users with a cleaner, less distracting
  interface.
• More privacy—Living people who have not joined Geni will become private and
  will not be searchable on Google.