Avast acquires CCleaner and Speeccy developer Piriform

Avast has just announced that it has acquired Piriform, the developer behind CCleaner and Speccy. The deal was announced over a year since Avast coughed up $1.3 billion to acquire its rival, AVG Technologies.

Piriform makes various device performance optimization software, but CCleaner is used by a huge 130 million people, and even 15 million users on Android. In November 2016, the developer announced CCleaner had been downloaded over 2 billion times, with a Piriform product installed over 23 million times per month.

Avast CEO Vince Steckler had the following to say about the acquisition of Piriform: "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".

He continued: "In today's connected world, it's all about speed and high performance, and with Piriform's robust technology we can address this need perfectly. We look forward to working with the Piriform team to grow the business together".

Avast added that the team at Piriform will become part of the overall Avast consumer business unit, and will report to Avast CTO Ondrej Vleck.