No,since v5 they were there but not added so often as now and they werent active as of now what avast blog article tells me is safemachine 2 has been launched couple years back so I am guessing its from v6 and they were working on it since then.

I have seen Sf detections from the avast deepscreen module and that is the reason I am confident its that.Plus,3 or 4 years back I never saw it in the sandbox neither it came in vps update history and it came very rarely.

Read: https://blog.avast.com/2014/02/07/research-buzz-undercover-technology/

This technology was fired up only in the start of this year and they are bettering it since then.Although Sf has been there even before it was very basic and very rarely added detection.Since end of feb I am seeing in every alternate VPS.

Rej,Panda is a full cloud AV.There is a difference when you are exclusively working on 1 technology and plus I am sure they have more attention to their cloud whereas avast has to see both home-made as well as cloud and also develop new protection modules.