I'm not sure there's a "they" here; IIRC this is and always has been one man project by Igor Pavlov, who incidentally didn't just write the software, but also c

I'm not sure there's a "they" here; IIRC this is and always has been one man project by Igor Pavlov, who incidentally didn't just write the software, but also created the LZMA algorithm which has had an absurdly long run as one of the world-leading general purpose compression algorithms.