An Orem company has used family history to land a history-making $12.3 million in first-round venture capital financing.
Ancestry.com Inc., a provider of family-oriented Internet content and services, said Wednesday that it received the investments from Intel Corp., Wasatch Venture Fund Inc. and the capital arm of Internet investment developer CMGI.CMGI contributed $10 million, and the two other investors added $2.3 million. Further financial details of the deals were not disclosed.
Curt Allen, Ancestry.com chief executive officer, said the company was able to complete its financing in just a few months, and it set a record for first-round financing received by a Utah-based information technology company.
"(The investors) believe in community," Allen said Wednesday. "They believe in content. They believe this has the opportunity to be one of the fastest-growing community sites on the Internet."
Ancestry.com Inc. offers two Web-based services. One of those, MyFamily.com, provides families with free Web sites and family-oriented content and commerce services. The other, Ancestry.com, an online genealogy resource, receives more than 1 million visits each day and includes more than 850 fully searchable databases with more than 200 million land, birth, marriage, death, census and immigration records.
Allen said the company will use some of its financing to keep adding new databases to the Ancestry.com site every day. By adding new content, he said, the site can attract new visitors, and more of those visitors will decide to pay a fee and subscribe to the site's services.
For MyFamily.com, Allen said, the goals are somewhat different.
"We believe the concept is one of the most promising community sites available right now," he said. "In fact, in some cases, we believe it can become the ultimate community site."
The new financing will allow the company to add the computer hardware and site features needed to support a rapidly growing membership, Allen said. He said the money also will help advance MyFamily.com's business model, which is based on advertising, sponsorship and access to electronic commerce.
Ancestry.com Inc., which was launched in 1996 as an extension of a traditional publishing business, remains privately held, and Allen said the company has no immediate plans to go public.
"It's clearly very interesting to us . . . but for now we want to continue to grow interest, traffic and revenue," he said. "If we do that right, it will all come naturally. . . . We want to make this the best place for families to come on the Internet."