Avast welcomes Piriform, creator of CCleaner, to its team.
I am happy to announce that we have acquired Piriform. Piriform is one of the largest providers of PC and mobile optimization software in the world, founded and based in London, UK. Their flagship product is the popular CCleaner, used by 130 million people, including 15 million Android users.
The CCleaner brand fits very well to Avast, for various reasons. We both believe in high-quality free products. People won’t just use a product because it is free. It’s quite the opposite, if you are providing a free product, you need to convince people that your product is free, but not cheap. You need to provide a pretty damn good product so people will use it and recommend it to their family and friends. Like Avast, Piriform provides a fully functioning product for free, with some excellent premium features on top, like disk defragmenting, file recovery, and hardware inventory.
Thanks to the high quality of our products, we both have a very loyal community of tech-savvy users, which we have built up over many years – Avast since 1988 and Piriform since 2004. Our communities are extremely important to us. They give us feedback regarding our products and even help other users with questions. We wouldn’t be where we are today without our loyal user base. We see many commonalities and synergies between CCleaner’s community and ours that we want to leverage.
Moreover, both CCleaner and Avast are known for their innovative and lightweight products. Piriform’s technology and products are extremely robust. We will maintain the Piriform products separately from our current Avast optimization portfolio, and Piriform customers can rest assured they will continue to get the attention and service they are used to. Our existing performance optimization products, Avast Cleanup and AVG TuneUp, will remain available.
Through the acquisition of Piriform, we broaden our presence in London, which is an important hub for tech companies, bringing us even closer to the local tech scene in London.
We welcome the Piriform staff to our team as part of the consumer business unit, led by Ondrej Vlcek, Avast CTO and EVP & GM, Consumer. We look forward to working with the Piriform team to continue building a strong future.
