Avalanche was launched in September 2020, by a company called Ava Labs in the USA. The team raised $6M in a financing round followed by private and public token sales totaling more than $45M. Ava Labs is led by Emin Gün Sirer who besides from being an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, is largely known among the scientific field for his contributions to peer-to-peer systems, operating systems, and computer networking. He developed the Avalanche protocol and its unique consensus model at Cornell University at first, with the assistance of Maofan Yin and Kevin Sekniqi. The current team working in Ava Labs consists of experts in computer science, economics, finance, and law. The company has two offices – in New York and Miami. The Avalanche team has a collective experience from leading Fortune 500 finance and tech companies to high-growth blockchain platforms. Currently, there are no Avalanche hacks confirmed, but there have been several exploits occurring on the network. It should be noted that so far, they have not been linked to security issues concerning Avalanche. The Avalanche protocol has been audited by Halborn in September 2020 and June 2021.