MyHeritage

MyHeritage was founded in Israel in 2003 by Gilad Japhet. The company develops a SaaS genealogy platform covering family tree building, historical record search, and DNA matching for family discovery. Headquarters are located in Or Yehuda, Israel. In 2021, MyHeritage was acquired by Francisco Partners, an American private equity firm.

The primary product is a subscription-based platform that lets users build family trees, search archives containing billions of historical records (birth, marriage, and death certificates, census records, and more), and upload and enhance old family photos. The MyHeritage DNA service allows users to submit a saliva sample and receive ethnicity estimates along with DNA match lists against other users in the database. The platform targets individual consumers researching their family roots and is sold primarily through annual and one-time subscriptions in a self-serve model.

MyHeritage Family Tree is the core platform for constructing and sharing family trees. MyHeritage DNA is the company's genetic testing service. In 2021, the company launched MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia, an AI-powered tool that animates still photos of people into short video clips, which went viral globally. Additional AI-driven tools include photo colorization and photo enhancement for old or degraded images.

MyHeritage's primary direct competitors are Ancestry (the largest player in the space with the biggest record database, US-based) and 23andMe (focused more heavily on health genetics). MyHeritage differentiates through strong European record databases, multilingual support across dozens of languages, and its visual AI photo tools. The company occupies a meaningful position in the consumer genealogy market, particularly in Europe and among users with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.

MyHeritage operates its primary R&D center in Or Yehuda, Israel, where the core engineering, product, and design teams are based. Founder Gilad Japhet is Israeli, and the company has been built largely around Israeli technical talent since its founding.