Cybersecurity company Torq has appointed former HashiCorp and Splunk executive Peter Polizzi as president and chief operating officer, positioning the enterprise technology veteran to lead its global expansion and growth in the agentic AI security operations market.
Polizzi brings 28 years of enterprise technology experience, including leadership positions at HashiCorp, Splunk and Palo Alto Networks. At HashiCorp, he helped scale the company’s global technical field organization and played a key role in its 2025 acquisition by IBM for $6.4 billion, according to Torq.
His appointment comes as Torq pursues an ambitious growth strategy that includes doubling its size annually, expanding its channel partner and enterprise customer base, and pursuing product and company acquisitions.
Polizzi to lead Torq’s AI SOC expansion
As president and COO, Polizzi will oversee Torq’s global operations, bringing its teams, product development and go-to-market activities together under a unified growth strategy. The company also expects him to help strengthen its market position as enterprises look for ways to manage increasingly complex security environments and respond to threats at machine speed.
“Torq has accomplished something extraordinary. It has built a category-defining technology platform, and won the trust of some of the world’s most demanding enterprises,” Polizzi said.
He pointed to the growing use of generative AI, autonomous agents, and connected enterprise systems as factors that expand the attack surface. In his view, security teams need new approaches that combine intelligence, automation and human oversight to keep pace.
Torq CEO and co-founder Ofer Smadari said the appointment would help the company pursue its ambition of becoming a central platform for security operations.
“The legacy SOC, with its human-speed processes, manual triage, and disconnected tools, cannot survive an era of AI-powered attacks,” Smadari said.
Acquisitions and product development fuel growth
Polizzi’s background suggests Torq is looking to strengthen the operational side of a business that has been expanding through product development and acquisitions.
Torq acquired Jit in May, integrating the cybersecurity startup’s AI Context Graph technology into its platform. This enhancement provides AI agents with critical organizational context, such as identities, access privileges, core business priorities, and sensitive assets, to improve incident investigations.
Beyond acquisitions, the firm has advanced its agentic capabilities. It debuted Agentic Builder in March, enabling security teams to build AI-driven workflows using natural-language descriptions. Afterward, Torq launched SOC Brain in July, a self-learning layer that uses historical investigation data and analyst actions to refine ongoing security evaluations.
These developments provide some context for Polizzi’s mandate to pursue additional product and company acquisitions. However, integrating new technologies while maintaining consistent platform performance and customer experience will become increasingly important as Torq expands.
Torq expands channel investment with REV program
Torq’s leadership change also comes as the company invests in building its channel business.
Last month, Torq introduced REV (Revenue Enablement Velocity), a partner program offering resellers, systems integrators and managed security service providers (MSSPs) 100% services margin protection, deal protection and dedicated enablement resources.
The program followed Torq’s report of 150% year-over-year channel revenue growth. It also introduced a 10-day onboarding target and training through Torq Academy to help partners develop the skills needed to sell, implement, and manage its AI SOC platform.
Polizzi’s experience scaling enterprise technology businesses could help Torq coordinate its expanding sales operations and partner ecosystem. For channel partners, the important question will be whether that investment translates into consistent partner support, stronger customer demand, and additional opportunities to deliver implementation and managed security services.
Torq’s ambition to double its size annually could create more room for partners, but rapid expansion will also require the company to maintain its existing partner relationships while bringing new customers and technologies into the business.
Scaling agentic security operations brings new challenges
For enterprise customers, Polizzi’s appointment does not introduce an immediate product change. Its potential impact is more likely to emerge through Torq’s ability to expand its platform, improve global support and deliver new capabilities.
Expanding an AI-driven SOC platform also raises important questions about how autonomous agents make decisions, when human approval is required, and how organizations maintain oversight of automated remediation. Torq’s ability to balance automation with governance, reliability and customer-specific security requirements will be important as it pursues greater enterprise adoption.
For Polizzi, the challenge is therefore not simply growing Torq’s revenue and workforce. It is scaling a security platform and partner ecosystem that enterprises can depend on as AI changes both the threats they face and the tools used to defend against them.
READ MORE: We spoke with Torq Co-Founder and CTO Leonid Belkind in July about the company’s agentic AI capabilities within SOC Brain.