Antivirus colossus Avast buys Piriform, the company behind CCleaner

[sincity]

Avast, the biggest antivirus company outside China, has just announced its purchase of Piriform, creator of the enormously popular system optimization tool CCleaner. 

CCleaner has over 130 million users worldwide, on both Android and Windows, and is a powerful new string in Avast’s bow.

“We see many commonalities between CCleaner and Avast, allowing for great new products for our user bases,” said Avast’s CEO Vince Steckler (pictured above) in a press release.

“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.”

Safe and secure

It’s not the only major purchase Avast has made recently. Last year, Avast bought rival PC security firm AVG, bringing 400 million new users under its wing.

Don’t worry if you rely on CCleaner to keep your PC running smoothly, though – we don’t anticipate any changes to Piriform’s winning formula any time soon.

After its acquisition of AVG, Avast pledged to continue supporting its software and, true to its word, it’s kept the two firms’ antivirus suites running in parallel. We predict it will let Piriform continue the good work, even if it integrates some of CCleaner's features features into its own programs.

• Check out our guide to this year's best free antivirus suites