MyHeritage.com Acquires Major Family Network OSN

MyHeritage.com, the company that operates a Web connecting families to their past and to one another, acquired the Hamburg, Germany-based OSN Group, which operates a network of 10 market-leading family sites, including Verwandt.de (Germany), Moikrewni.pl (Poland) and Dynastree.com (USA).
Following the transaction, MyHeritage.com holds an international registered member base of 47m, and offers its services in 35 languages.
In addition, the acquisition helps the company build on its existing strength in the USA, UK, Canada, France and Australia while significantly developing in key European markets such as Germany, Poland and the Netherlands as well as many major Latin American markets.
MyHeritage.com offers a powerful suite of tools and technologies for managing family connections online, including free downloadable genealogy software, a matching technology that connects family trees across different languages, pronunciations and spellings, and facial recognition technology that tags family photos. The new technologies from OSN will be integrated into MyHeritage.com.
Combining these services into a single international platform expands the size of MyHeritage.com’s user-generated family graph to 13 million family trees including 530m genealogical profiles.
The company has offices in London, UK; Boulder, Colorado, USA; and Tel Aviv, Israel, and as part of the acquisition, it will be establishing an office in Hamburg where experienced OSN team members will be based.
Commenting on the transaction, Gilad Japhet, founder and CEO of MyHeritage.com, was quoted as saying: “MyHeritage.com has established itself as the trusted home for families on the web.
“By integrating these market-leading services into a single international platform, we are taking a great step towards realizing our vision of connecting families around the world”. 
Investors in the company include Accel Partners and Index Ventures.
FinSMEs 
03/02/2010

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