Torq has just crossed a symbolic and very real threshold, announcing a $140 million Series D that lifts the company to unicorn status with a $1.2 billion valuation and total funding of $332 million. Led by Merlin Ventures, with participation from existing backers Evolution Equity Partners, Notable Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Insight Partners, and Greenfield Partners, the round is less about capital scarcity and more about acceleration. Torq is positioning itself as the company that finally turns the Security Operations Center from a human-constrained, alert-driven bottleneck into a largely autonomous system powered by agentic AI. That framing matters, because this isn’t a marginal improvement story; it’s a replacement narrative for how security operations actually run at scale.
What Torq is selling, and what the market appears to be buying aggressively, is the idea of a fully realized AI SOC platform rather than another layer bolted onto SIEM or legacy SOAR. The company’s platform is built around hyperautomation, autonomous alert triage, and analyst fatigue reduction, but those phrases only land once you see them operating together. Instead of analysts drowning in low-fidelity alerts and manual workflows, Torq’s AI Agents perform investigation, prioritization, and response continuously, escalating only when human judgment genuinely adds value. The effect, according to customers, isn’t just faster response times but a structural shift in how SOC teams allocate attention, which is quietly one of the most expensive resources in cybersecurity.
Merlin Ventures’ decision to lead the round is especially telling. Known for deep access to U.S. commercial and public sector markets, Merlin is effectively underwriting Torq’s move into federal and government environments where compliance, scale, and reliability matter more than hype cycles. Shay Michel, Merlin’s managing partner, framed Torq as a rare fusion of automation and human judgment designed for asymmetric threats and real-world operational scale, and that phrasing feels deliberate. This isn’t AI as a dashboard feature; it’s AI as an operating model, something government SOCs are increasingly forced to consider as attack surfaces expand faster than headcount ever could.
From Torq’s side, CEO and co-founder Ofer Smadari is leaning hard into the idea that the agentic era makes legacy tools obsolete by design. The company reports strong revenue growth in 2025, with Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 customers deploying Torq AI Agents for everything from phishing triage to automated containment. The important nuance here is adoption dynamics: Torq’s agents are built for self-service, meaning security teams don’t need armies of consultants to make them useful. That bottom-up usage has quietly transformed Torq from a point solution into the primary operating platform inside many SOCs, which is usually the moment vendors stop being “tools” and start becoming infrastructure.
Customer testimony reinforces that pattern. At Valvoline, the SOC reportedly had meaningful automation live within 48 hours, reclaiming analyst time and turning once-manual response actions into default behaviors. Similar signals come from Virgin Atlantic, where Torq now functions as an umbrella platform across the airline’s security stack, simplifying operations while expanding coverage. These aren’t edge cases or innovation labs; they’re complex, regulated enterprises with little tolerance for experimental tooling.
Strategically, the Series D also validates Torq’s maturity as an enterprise-grade vendor. The company now counts customers such as Marriott, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Siemens, and Uber, which signals not just trust in the technology but confidence in Torq’s ability to operate across multinational, highly heterogeneous environments. The earlier acquisition of RevRod further strengthened its multi-agent capabilities, enabling fully autonomous investigations and near-instant triage of low-fidelity alerts, reportedly cutting investigation time by up to 90%.
What emerges from this announcement is a picture of a company that has moved past proving whether agentic AI belongs in the SOC and is now focused on scaling that model everywhere it can operate, including high-stakes federal environments governed by frameworks like FedRAMP. The $140 million round isn’t about survival or even optionality; it’s about speed, reach, and category ownership. If Torq executes as its customers and investors expect, the phrase “AI SOC” may soon stop sounding aspirational and start reading like a default architecture. And yes, that’s the kind of shift that usually creates, rather than follows, unicorns.