Rarlab |verified|

Throughout the years, RARLAB has continued to innovate and improve its products. Some notable achievements include:

Roshal does something radical: he designs a new compression algorithm from scratch. Not a tweak. Not a fork. A true original. He calls it — Roshal ARchive . rarlab

By allowing anyone (including competitors) to include UnRAR in their software, Rarlab made .RAR a universal format. Every competing archiver—7-Zip, PeaZip, even macOS’s The Unarchiver—can extract RAR files. But only WinRAR can create them (outside of third-party reverse-engineered tools, which are legally shaky). Throughout the years, RARLAB has continued to innovate

In 1995, Roshal’s brother, , joins the project. Alexander is the interface guy. He builds WinRAR —a graphical Windows shell that looks, functionally, exactly the same today as it did in 1996. Not a fork

Licenses are also cheap ($29 for a personal license, lifetime updates). And Rarlab has no VC investors demanding hockey-stick growth. The Roshal brothers own it outright. They are reportedly comfortable. Very comfortable.

RARLAB was founded in 1993 by Eugene Roshanov and Alexander Rimsky-Korsakov, two software developers from Russia. Initially, the company focused on creating a file archiver that could compress and extract files efficiently. The result was RAR, a proprietary file format that quickly gained popularity due to its high compression ratio and fast processing speeds.