Webroot

Webroot was founded in 1997, and its first hit was Window Washer — a tool for erasing your browsing history, which says something about what people wanted in the early 2000s. During the spyware epidemic a few years later, Spy Sweeper sold well, as toolbars and pop-up ads had moved into every other Windows PC.

SecureAnywhere arrived in 2011, built on technology from British firm Prevx: instead of hauling around a large local signature database, the client asked the cloud about unknown files, which made it unusually small. Backup company Carbonite bought Webroot in 2019, and OpenText bought Carbonite later that year.