Pavel Baudis

In 1988 software engineer Pavel Baudis wrote his first antivirus program after a friend sent him a floppy disk containing the "Vienna" computer virus.In April that year, he and Eduard Kucera, with whom he'd worked at Research Institute of Mathematical Machines, co-founded AWIL to sell the software.Following the fall of Communism in 1989, the pair broke off to establish it what would become Avast. Now run by an outside CEO, Avast, which secures online activities for more than 435 million users, went public in May 2018.Its goals for the future are loftier: to protect all things in your home connectedto the internet, from thermostats to webcams.