Avast

Avast was brought into existence in 1888 by Pavel Baudiŝ and Eduard Kučera. The current CEO and the chairman of the company are John G. Schwarz and Ondřej Vlček, respectively. The parent company of Avast is NortonLifeLock, and there are more than 1700 employees working for this company. Plus, the company and its IPO have been private since 2010 and 2018, respectively. 

Furthermore, the Avast company has a total number of more than 435 million active users monthly. Plus, as of 2020, it is the second-largest market share among anti-malware application vendors worldwide. Besides that, the company has 25 offices around the world. In 2021 NortonLifeLock said that they were planning to merge with Avast, and the deal was done for $8 billion. 

Avast highlights

• The founders of Avast are Pavel Baudiŝ and Eduard Kučera.
• The parent company of Avast is NortonLifeLock. 
• This company came into existence in 1988. 
• The prominent people of the company are John G. Schwarz and Ondřej Vlček.
• As of 2020, the net income of the company was $169.6 million, and the total asset was $2.707 billion.
• The subsidiary of the company is AVG technologies, Piriform, and HMA. 
• The total revenue of the company in 2020 was 355.4 million US dollars.
• Avast antivirus is one of the most famous antivirus products available in the market. 

History

Pavel Baudiŝ and Eduard Kučera met each other at the Research Institute for Mathematical Machines. While completing their education in the institute, Pavel Baudiŝ found a virus on a floppy disk and made his first program to remove the virus. Later, he approached Eduard Kucera, and they both worked on building the Avast. The initial name of the company they founded was Alwin, and the name of the product was Avast. 

Moreover, in the year 1995, one of the Avast employees, Ondřej Vlček, was the first person to write an antivirus program for the Windows 95 Operating System. In the period of the 1990s, this company got an award for every category it was tested by an IT security testing organization security researchers at the Virus Bulletin. As a result, the company gained recognition and became popular all over the world. 

Additionally, under its freemium model, it used to offer the base Avast software product free of cost. Due to that, Alwin started to face financial problems in 2001. However, the freemium model also helped in increasing the number of software users, and by 2004 there were one million users. In addition, the number grew to 20 million in the span of just two years. In 2009, Vince Steckler, the former executive of Symantec, was appointed the company’s new CEO. In 2010, Alwin changed its name to Avast and successfully raised $100 million in venture capital investment in the same year. 

Furthermore, in 2013 the number of software users grew to 200 million worldwide, and its customers were from 35 countries. Additionally, the program is translated into more than 43 languages. The CVC capital took an interest in 2014, but the amount was not disclosed. At that time, the purchase value of Avast was 1 billion. After that, in the same year developing the mobile apps, the company acquired a mobile app developer, inmite. 

By 2015 Avast had become the largest shareholder in the antivirus market. In 2019, Jaya Baloo took the position of Chief Information security officer. The company released a new and secure private mobile web browser for Android. It was based on the technology, which was acquired from an unreported acquisition of Tenta, and it was a startup company based in Seattle. 

Norton LifeLock announced its merger with Avast in 2021 and acquired the company for $8 billion. And in the same year, the company changed its previous identity and started focusing on protecting digital freedom for all online citizens.