Gilad Japhet |Founder & CEO
Gilad founded MyHeritage in 2003 and has been its CEO ever since. As a “garage” startup started at Gilad’s home in Israel to pursue his dream of turning his genealogy hobby into a successful company, MyHeritage grew rapidly, fueled by 11 acquisitions. It now employs 600 employees, with offices in Israel, USA, and Ukraine. Over the years, the company reinvented itself several times as it expanded from genealogy to DNA testing and then to medical genetic testing. In 2020, Gilad led MyHeritage’s efforts to establish a COVID-19 testing lab to help Israel fight the pandemic. This became the largest lab in Israel and among the largest in the world and since its inception in May 2020, it tested more than 3 million people. Through an innovative testing program at Israel’s old age homes, the MyHeritage Lab reduced Israel’s national mortality in the pandemic by an estimated 30%. This helped evolve the mission of MyHeritage from changing lives to also saving lives. In October 2020, Gilad developed a method for weekly COVID-19 testing of students and staff in schools using pooling, and named it Education Shield – it is now being widely adopted throughout Israel. MyHeritage is also acclaimed for its pro bono activities, including DNA Quest and Tribal Quest.
In February 2021 MyHeritage announced that it signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by American private equity firm Francisco Partners. A few days later, MyHeritage launched Deep Nostalgia™, a feature based on collaboration with AI-company D-ID, allowing users to reanimate photos of their loved ones. This feature quickly went viral and in a few weeks was used 50 million times, propelling the MyHeritage mobile app to the #1 spot of the App Store in the USA and 27 other countries.
Gilad is considered as a product and technology visionary and a leader of the genealogy industry. He is a proud graduate of the Technion, where he holds a B.Sc. summa cum laude in Computer Science. Concurrently with his studies at the Technion, Gilad held a full-time position with BRM Technologies, where he co-created a pioneering anti-virus product, acquired by Norton (Symantec). Gilad’s mother, emeritus Prof. Sara Japhet, is one of the world’s foremost biblical scholars.