Ancestry.com LLC may be a household name nowadays for those interested in tracing their family lineage, but it wasn’t so much so in 2012.
Permira Partner Dipan Patel, then an associate with the London private equity firm, recognized the potential for the online genealogy platform to one day capture the interest of general public.
- Dipan Patel
“A lot of the underlying momentum was there to be seen in the data the company had, but it took some work to get at it,” said Brian Ruder, a partner who co-heads Permira’s technology team. “Dipan was able to see that and articulate it.”
Permira invested in Ancestry.com, of Provo, Utah, in a $1.6 billion deal. Other private equity investors in technology had the chance to look at the asset, but passed on concerns that interest in genealogy would be a fad.
Mr. Patel—a 33-year old Permira executive who was promoted to partner in February—said Ancestry.com is a “distant category-leader with a unique data moat,” and believed that consumers’ fascination with their family heritage would sustain its business model.
In the past few years, Permira helped extend Ancestry.com’s reach to Germany, where there is a pool of genealogy-curious consumers, as well as a trove of records of interest to the 50 million- plus U.S. citizens of German descent. It also helped expand its DNA product offering so consumers can find out their ethnic mix and locate distant relatives in the platform’s database of 1.4 million people.
Ancestry.com said in a February release that its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization rose 16.7% last year to $263.0 million and its subscriber base increased by 150,000 last year to reach 2.26 million by the end of December.
“The company has grown substantially and many of the people who looked at it in 2012 have confessed to me privately that they think they missed a good one,” Mr. Ruder said.
Read our profile of Mr. Patel in this month’s Private Equity Analyst. (Subscription required.)
Write to Amy Or at [email protected]