Avast, the cyber security giant has acquired Piriform, the company behind CCleaner tool. Avast will maintain CCleaner separately from its current optimization portfolio. While the Piriform consumers will continue to get the services like earlier.
CCleaner is of the most popular system cleaners on desktop and mobile used by 130 million people, including 15 million Android users. Now, while Avast will support this along with Avast’s own existing performance optimization products like Avast Cleanup and AVG TuneUp.
Vince Steckler, CEO of Avast, commented on the acquisition,
“We see many commonalities between CCleaner and Avast, allowing for great new products for our user bases. Avast and CCleaner are the top two downloaded products on popular download sites. They are both known by advanced users as focused on performance, so we believe there will be a great interest from our CCleaner customers in using Avast security products and vice versa.”
Piriform team will join Avast as part of their consumer business unit, which is led by Ondrej Vlcek, Avast CTO and EVP & GM, Consumer.
Founded in 2004 in the UK, Piriform is a privately held company that makes a number of utility and optimization tools for Windows, Mac, and Android. CCleaner was the flagship product of Piriform. It speeds up computers and smartphones by removing junk and thus improves the performance of computers.
Piriform, on acquisition, said,
“Joining Avast, Piriform will be part of Avast’s consumer business unit, and together Avast and Piriform will be committed to making great products that deliver value to Avast’s entire base of end users,”
It’s not the first time when Avast has made a major purchase. Last year, Avast has bought its rival PC security firm AVG. That acquisition brought 400 million new users under Avast’s umbrella.
