Avast eyes expansion with $100 million investment

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Avast Software has received a $100 million (£64.4 million) boost from growth equity investor Summit Partners, which has acquired a minority stake in the security company.

The investment is a sign of Summit’s confidence in the ‘freemium’ model Avast bases its business on, offering a free anti-virus along with a premium one, said Avast chief executive Vince Steckler.

“This has been a very long time coming for Avast,” said Steckler.

“In the past, we’ve never had a real reason to take an investor. Even currently the company is very profitable,” he added, during a conference call.

“But when we started looking at what we really want to do in this business and how much we want to grow this company and how committed we are to the freemium distribution model, it made a lot of sense to bring in a real world class investor.”

With the new funding, Avast is simply hoping to maximise its user base and it wants “as many free users around the world” as it can get, Steckler explained.

Summit managing director, Scott Collins, said his company believed Avast was the fastest growing major security software company in the world.

“We believe that Summit Partners, with our track record of investing in high growth security software businesses over the last 25 years will help bring an added set of relationships, of knowledge of strategy and of assistance to help Avast and the team,” Collins added.

According to Avast, its anti-virus product protects one in every five consumer computers in the world, while its Virus Lab adds 3,000 new virus samples a day to its database.

Last year, IT PRO included Avast's software in its top free security software feature.

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