Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Ancestry.com Set to Go Public - Looking to Raise $75MM - Solid Financial Growth, Profitability



Underwriters for the deal
MORGAN STANLEY
BofA MERRILL LYNCH
JEFFERIES & COMPANY
PIPER JAFFRAY
BMO CAPITAL MARKETS

Link to S-1

ANCESTRY.COM INC.

Mission

Ancestry.com’s mission is to help everyone discover, preserve and share their family history.

Overview

Ancestry.com is the world’s largest online resource for family history, with almost one million paying subscribers around the world as of June 30, 2009. We have been a leader in the family history market for over 20 years and have helped pioneer the market for online family history research. We believe that most people have a fundamental desire to understand who they are and from where they came, and that anyone interested in discovering, preserving and sharing their family history is a potential user of Ancestry.com. We strive to make our service valuable to individuals ranging from the most committed family historians to those taking their first steps towards satisfying their curiosity about their family stories.

The foundation of our service is an extensive and unique collection of billions of historical records that we have digitized, indexed and put online over the past 12 years. We have developed efficient and proprietary systems for digitizing handwritten historical documents, and have established relationships with national, state and local government archives, historical societies, religious institutions and private collectors of historical content around the world. These digital records and documents, combined with our proprietary online search technologies and tools, enable our subscribers to research their family history, build their family trees and make meaningful discoveries about the lives of their ancestors.

We have built the world’s largest online community of people interested in their family histories, and we believe that this network is highly valuable to our subscribers. Our community is a large and growing source of user-generated content uniquely focused on family history. Over the past three years, our registered users have created over 11 million family trees containing more than 1.1 billion profiles. They have uploaded and attached to their trees over 22 million photographs, scanned documents, written stories and audio clips. This growing pool of user-generated content adds color and context to the family histories assembled from the digitized historical documents found on Ancestry.com. Our subscribers also have attached to their trees over 273 million records from our company-acquired content collection, a process that is helping further organize this collection by associating specific records with people in family trees.

In addition, we are beginning to deploy tools and technologies to facilitate social networking and crowd sourcing, a means of leveraging collaborative efforts. These tools and technologies are intended to provide our subscribers with an expanding family history collaboration network in which insights and discoveries are shared by relatives, distant and close. Our service also provides a platform from which our subscribers can share their stories. Subscribers can invite family and friends to help build their family trees, add personal memories and upload photographs and stories of their own.

We provide ongoing value to our subscribers by regularly adding new historical content, enhancing our websites with new tools and features and enabling greater collaboration among our users through the growth of our global community. Our plan to achieve long-term and sustainable growth is to increase our subscriber base in the United States and around the world by serving our loyal base of existing subscribers and by attracting new subscribers.

Our revenues have increased from $122.6 million in 2004 to $197.6 million in 2008, a compound annual growth rate of 12.7%.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love cashing out private equity investors in IPOs

Anonymous said...

in it to win it