Gilad Japhet

Gilad Japhet was born in 1969 in Jerusalem

Gilad Japhet was born in Jerusalem on December 19, 1969. His father, Gideon Japhet, is an attorney, and his mother, Sara Japhet, is a Bible scholar who received the Israel Prize. His grandfather Chaim Japhet was a member of the Jewish National Council and a pioneer of social work in Israel.

He attended the Hebrew University High School in Jerusalem. In 1984 his family moved to Oxford, England, where he became interested in personal computers. Back in Israel, he formed a programming group for the Sinclair Spectrum called The Israeli Team.

He served in the IDF from 1988 to 1992 as a technology officer. From 1992 to 1996 he studied software engineering at the Technion and earned a BSc summa cum laude. During his studies he led the computer virus analysis team at BRM Technologies.

From 1996 to 2000 he worked at BackWeb Technologies, moved to Silicon Valley as product manager and took part in its NASDAQ offering. He later held product roles at Spearhead Technologies and Picatel Systems. In 2003 he began building family tree software that became the basis of MyHeritage, which moved to Or Yehuda in 2012.

In 2013 and 2014 he led a volunteer project to help descendants of Holocaust victims claim looted property in East Germany. He is married with three children and lives in Moshav Bnei Atarot.