Former Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, and HashiCorp Executive Brings 28 Years of Enterprise Leadership to Scale Torq’s Global Operations, Accelerate AI SOC Innovation, and Pursue Triple-Digit Growth Strategy
NEW YORK, NY, November 9, 2026 — Torq, the established agentic security operations leader, today announced the appointment of Peter Polizzi as President and Chief Operating Officer (COO), adding one of enterprise technology’s most accomplished transformation and growth executives to its leadership team as the company accelerates its position in the AI SOC market. Polizzi brings 28 years of enterprise software leadership, including senior roles at HashiCorp, Splunk, and Palo Alto Networks, and was key to the 2025 $6.4 billion acquisition of HashiCorp by IBM.
As President and COO, Polizzi will lead Torq’s next phase of enterprise expansion, aligning global teams, operations, product strategy, and go-to-market execution around a unified growth strategy. His mandate is ambitious: position Torq to double in size annually while significantly increasing its global workforce and enterprise customer base, further differentiate its product portfolio, and pursue strategic product and company acquisitions. The objective is to scale Torq’s success with even greater alignment and execution across its global organization, creating the foundation for sustained triple-digit growth.
“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,” said Polizzi. “We are deep into the Age of Agentic AI, and enterprises are racing to harness its potential. But generative AI, the proliferation of autonomous agents, and the massive volumes of data in motion for agents and endpoints create an expanding attack surface at an unprecedented rate. Enterprises need a fundamentally different way to defend themselves in this new environment. Torq is uniquely built to deliver it, giving security teams the intelligence, automation and control to operate and defend at machine speed.”
For enterprise security teams, that new reality means protecting increasingly-complex environments spanning machine identities, hybrid infrastructure, distributed data, and fragmented security tools. Torq addresses that complexity with a deterministic and nondeterministic AI-native security operations platform that combines alerting, analysis, investigation, orchestration, remediation, and response, enabling security teams to operate with greater agility, intelligence, and precision.
This integrated approach brings together autonomous AI agents with human expertise and oversight, moving security operations beyond reactive monitoring, toward intelligent, automated decision-making and response. Polizzi sees this transformation as a defining opportunity to establish Torq as the central security operations platform for the AI era.
“The AI SOC is no longer a prediction. It’s happening and Torq is leading it,” said Ofer Smadari, CEO and co-founder, Torq. “The legacy SOC, with its human-speed processes, manual triage, and disconnected tools, cannot survive an era of AI-powered attacks. We saw that early and built for it. We proved that the Agentic SOC is the future of security operations. Now, we’re scaling the company that will define the category for the next decade, and our ambition is clear: Torq will be the platform every SOC runs on. Peter has scaled some of the most important businesses in enterprise security. He chose Torq because he sees what we see: the SOC is being rebuilt from the ground up, and Torq is built to own it. With Peter, we’re going after this market at an entirely different scale, and we’re moving faster than ever.”
Polizzi’s experience spans transformation into hypergrowth for some of the industry’s most recognized companies. At HashiCorp, he scaled the company’s global technical field organization before architecting its acquisition and integration into IBM. Previously, as SVP of Technical GTM and Field Operations at Splunk, he scaled its cloud transformation and helped establish the operational foundation for its acquisition by Cisco. At Palo Alto Networks, he led its Americas Technical Sales and Consulting organization through its platform-to-cloud transformation.
Polizzi also serves as an advisory board member at IVP, bringing an active market perspective across enterprise software, infrastructure and AI. A NATO veteran and advocate for ethical AI governance, Polizzi is trilingual, holds a degree in Applied Mathematics and is based in New York.
About Torq
Torq is transforming cybersecurity with the Torq AI SOC Platform. Torq empowers enterprises to instantly and precisely triage, investigate, and respond to security events at scale. Torq’s customer base includes major multinational enterprises such as Chipotle Mexican Grill, Informatica, Kyocera, Lego, Lowe’s, Macy’s, Marriott, Prudential, Siemens, Telefónica, Uber, Valvoline, and Virgin Atlantic.
Media Contact:
Highwire PR
[email protected]
