Stephen Pankhurst was the co-founder of Friends Reunited along with his wife Julie.

In 1999, Stephen’s wife Julie, was pregnant with their first child. She had just used the internet to track down her long lost Grandfather that she had never seen.

Realising the power of the internet, and a desire to find out what some of her old school friends were up to, she came up with the idea of FriendsReunited, exploiting a gap in the UK market following the success of US website Classmates.com.

Friends Reunited was officially launched in June 2000. The very first version of the site looked pretty horrible. Stephen was not a graphic designer, so he just knocked together anything.

However, the functionality worked and very soon they started to get people coming to the site and registering themselves against schools. Nine months later, after a redesign, some hard work, lots of extra features, encouragement from users and the odd mention or two in the press, things started to get interesting.

By the end of the year, it had 3,000 members, and a year later (2001) this had increased to 2.5 million.

By December 2005, Friends Reunited had over 15 million members and was bought by British TV company ITV plc for £120 million ($208 million), plus further payments of up to £55 million based on its performance up to 2009.

In 2007, ITV Chairman Michael Grade described the site as "the sweet spot" of the internet and stated that "Friends Reunited is one of the great undersung jewels in the crown ... one of the most important bits of ITV going forward, a massive presence, and profitable"

That year the site made a profit of £22 million, but its market valuation had fallen sharply from the £120 million paid by ITV in 2005 and it achieved growth in UK traffic of only 1.2%, compared to Facebook's 2,393% and Bebo's 173%.

In March 2008, after losing 47% of unique users in the previous 12 months, the site dropped the subscription fee required to contact members, but the decline continued.

In 2009, Friends Reunited was sold for £25 million to Brightsolid Limited. By December 2011, Brightsolid estimated that Friends Reunited was worth only £5.2 million, a fifth of the price it paid to ITV two years previously.

The company relaunched Friends Reunited in March 2012 with a new emphasis on nostalgia and memories.

On January 2016, Friends Reunited revealed that it would be closing down the website after 16 years of operation. On February 2016 the site closed down.