The Ancestry Story

Ancestry has redefined — and dramatically expanded — the way families connect.

Launched in 1996, Ancestry has become the dominant category leader in online family history and consumer genomics data, and a recognizable global brand. As of 2024, the company hosts 60 billion records, 13+ billion ancestral profiles, and counts over 25 million people in their consumer DNA network.

Ancestry was acquired by Blackstone in 2020.

Ancestry & Spectrum

Ancestry’s management team partnered with Spectrum for more than a decade, initially investing in 2003. The partnership tackled growth opportunities from senior management and board recruitment, to global expansion and M&A, new product launches, pricing studies, and strategic partnerships.

Over the course of our 17-year partnership, Ancestry underwent multiple transformations – from a bootstrapped company in hypergrowth mode to a Spectrum-controlled business, and through an IPO, take-private, multiple changes of hands, and ultimate exit to Blackstone. Throughout those years together, Ancestry grew significantly across multiple indexes, making a significant impact in online genealogy and DNA science for customers and shareholders alike.

Many of the leaders who guided this evolution were introduced by Spectrum – such as Tim Sullivan, CEO from 2005-2017; Howard Hochhauser, current CFO & COO; and experienced board members like SurveyMonkey’s Dave Goldberg and then-Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer.

On the product side, we helped Ancestry turn on the user-generated flywheel that makes its moat so powerful. Initially, the site’s research was once entirely fueled by records – purchased and uploaded by Ancestry. Today, those records are brought to life through user-generated family trees and photographs, aided by Ancestry Hints ®, which helps users identify potential ancestors and fill in details about members already in their tree. Ancestry’s 3.6M subscribers have created more than 100M family trees and contributed over 300M photos to the site.

In 2012 Ancestry launched AncestryDNA – home DNA testing kits which, combined the Ancestry’s historical records and family trees, have brought over 25 million people to its database across 30+ international markets.

In 2020, Blackrock acquired Ancestry for $4.7 Billion.

Milestones

• 1983: Founded (as “Ancestry Publishing”)
• 1996: Launches Ancestry.com
• 2003: Partnership with Spectrum
• 2007: Spectrum leads recapitalization, acquiring a majority stake
• 2009: Goes public $ACOM
• 2012: Acquired in a take-private transaction by Permira
• 2020: Acquired by Blackstone