MyHeritage acquires Kindo for smarter family tree

Israeli based MyHeritage, recently funded by Accel and Index Ventures is acquiring UK based, Kindo.com a family tree service. The amount of the acquisition is not announced but given Kindo’s performance (according to Google trends) we assume this was not a big operation. We can assume also that part of the recent funding was dedicated to the acquisition.

So why would a service with 25 million users would care for a small player? Probably to extend its presence in Europe with an existing team and have a plug and play service in 14 languages but also to have a comparable technology and product asset with its main new challengers: Geni.com et Verwandt (in Germany). Kindo’s product is nicely done (see below for yourself) and even better than MyHeritage’s own service. It makes sense to think that both services will merge at some point. [Update: TechCrunch UK has more on this].

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=3329178269245588621&hl=un&fs=true

Kindo was funded by TAG and Ambient Sound Investment (a fund created by ex Skype engineers)

update: it didn’t strike me when i first wrote this post but Saul Klein is both an investor in Kindo (with TAG) and in MyHeritage (with Index). I assume he was a key facilitator in that deal. If you add to that his ex position at Skype, you end up understanding that the web is a really small family, which in this case is obviously helpful (no play on words)