AVG

AVG stands for Anti-Virus Guard and is a prominent brand in the field of cybersecurity and privacy. Additionally, it offers a variety of utility software applications for computer devices and mobile phones. In 1991, the company was founded by John Gritzbach and Thomáš Hofer. It was founded in Czechoslovakia at the time when the company was turning from communism to capitalism. 

Moreover, this organization is a subsidiary-type company. Avast is its parent company as it acquired this company. However, the brand name is still used even after the merger of the company. The headquarter of AVG is located in Prague, Czech. At the beginning of the 2000s, AVG started planning to increase the reach of its products across the border. Additionally, later in February 2012, it went public on the New York Stock Exchange. 

AVG Technologies Highlights-

• AVG was established in 1991 by John Gritzbach and Thomáš Hofer. 
• The parent company of AVG is Avast, and it was acquired by Avast in 2016 for the amount of 1.3 billion US dollars. 
• The company's headquarter is located in Prague, Czech. 
• AVG is one of the biggest cybersecurity software organizations, and its most popular products are Antivirus products. 
• It offers Anti-virus products as freeware programs. 
• The company was founded in Brno, Czechoslovakia. 
• The CEO of AVG technologies is Gary Kovacs. 

History

The AVG company was started at the beginning of the 1990s by John Gritzbach and Thomáš Hofer. Additionally, they established the company in Brno city of Czechoslovakia. The former name of the company was Grisoft. It was the time when the country was shifting from communism to capitalism. At the starting year of the company, it used to provide IT equipment and third-party products. Additionally, it also used to sell its own antivirus products. Grisoft got the opportunity to grow when the country started to lose its international trade policies, so it was able to exchange its technologies with companies in Europe. 

Furthermore, by 1998, there were only 13 employees in the company. Later Grisoft expanded to the US markets and created an American company named AVG. Afterward, the company increased its reach to Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and several other countries. For a long period, it was providing antivirus software to the companies which were selling computers with preinstalled software of Grisoft. However, by the year 2006, it started to offer its products directly to customers. 

Apart from that, in 2001, this company was sold to Benson Oak Capital, a venture capital firm. Later on, that firm sold 65% percent in Grisoft to Intel Capital and Enterprise Investors in 2005. The deal was done for the amount of 52 million US dollars. After that, money was used on various investments, and in 2006, the company bought a spyware company Ewido Networks. The following year, it acquired the Exploit Preventions Lab, a browser security company. 

In 2008, it named its parent company AVG. However, before that, the name was used for software and also for its American subsidiary. In the same year, for a minor stake in this company, TA Associates put an amount of 200 million US dollars into the company. By 2009, it disclosed its plan to acquire Sana Security, an analyzer of software behavior. Plus, it also obtained DroidSecurity, a mobile security startup, along with iMedix Web Technologies, in 2016. Besides that, in 2012, it took parental control of the software company Bsecure.

Additionally, in 2012, Gary Kavocs, former CEO of Mozilla, got the CEO position of the company. He was responsible for making a one-page privacy policy in order to talk about the type of data the firm collects and the information it sells to advertisers about free users. 

In 2014, AVG disclosed information about the acquisition of a cybersecurity company, Location Labs. The Location Labs are used to make products for mobile devices. Besides that, the deal was done for an estimated about of 220 million US dollars. Later on, in 2016, Avast acquired AVG for the sum of 1.3 billion US dollars. Additionally, during that time, the company had 95 million users worldwide, and there were 600 employees working in the company. Plus, the total revenue of the company was around 155 million US dollars annually. After the merger, the combined company held about 20% of the market and became the largest antivirus company in the world. 

By the year 2015, it bought Prevax, a VPN company, and MyRoll, an Israeli-based gallery app company. In 2017, AVG acquired a UK-based firm Piriform. It was a clean-up utility developer CCleaner with 130 million installations.