Portfolio Insights

Discovering the Past and Connecting the Present: Blackstone’s Partnership with Ancestry

We're committing our scale and resources to help transform Ancestry into a digital leader and empower people around the world to connect with their histories.

At Blackstone, we invest in fast-growing, high-quality companies, helping them scale efficiently to become global industry champions. Our conviction in technological innovation, which is one of the biggest secular drivers of growth today, leads us to seek and back high-quality, digitally enabled companies with strong business models and missions we believe in. Our investment in Ancestry encapsulates this strategy.

Ancestry was founded in 1983 as a publisher of genealogy reference books. Since then, it’s adapted to the changing technological landscape by switching from binders-and-file-cabinets system to a digital interface. Today, it is the global leader in the digital family history services space, with over 3.6 million subscribers across 30 countries.

As consumers increasingly become more interested in learning about their family histories, we see opportunities to accelerate Ancestry’s already rapid growth by expanding its user base, strengthening its product offering and building a best-in-class leadership team.

We have tapped Deborah Liu, a seasoned product executive with years of experience leading consumer technology companies, to help shepherd Ancestry through its next stage of growth.

Since its founding, fostering human connection has been core to Ancestry’s mission. We’re excited to help Ancestry grow into a global tech leader – and in doing so, further empower its users to deepen their relationship with the past and connect in the present.