Founded in 1991, the company was officially established under the newly free market of then-Czechoslovakia. The developer, AVAST Software a.s. (formerly known as ALWIL Software a.s.), is headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, with offices in Friedrichshafen and Munich, Germany; Austin, Texas, and Redwood City, California; and Hong Kong and Beijing, China
AVAST Software s.r.o. currently produces a range of security freeware and shareware programs for both personal and commercial use on PCs, Macs, and Android devices; as of 2013, more than 200 million devices worldwide used avast!. In June 2012, Avast had 17.4% of the worldwide security vendor market share.
The software has received a number of awards from Virus Bulletin for close to 100% detection of "in-the-wild" viruses and won the Secure Computing Readers' Trust Award.The central scanning engine has been certified by ICSA Labsand West Coast Labs' Checkmark process.






