If you haven’t heard of Torq before, it may be because the name and business are fairly new. The company was formerly known as StackPulse, but a pivot in business also motivated them to pursue a new name. And new infusion of capital — a $50 million Series B led by Insight Partners — will probably make that name pretty memorable around Portland.
Today, we’re announcing our $50 million Series B funding led by Insight Partners with participation from SentinelOne, GGV Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Together with them, we believe that security teams deserve better. Better ways to collaborate, better ways to work, better ways to keep our lives and livelihoods protected.
These days, a lot of us are asking “In a remote first world, what does a ‘Portland company’ mean?” Torq has an answer:
Our go to market leaders across sales, marketing, field engineering and success have all worked together in Portland at Portland-based companies like Twistlock and Puppet. Through those experiences we’ve been able to rely on Portland’s rapidly growing technology ecosystem and talent pool – as well as the fact that it’s a great place to balance work and life. When it came time to scale up Torq – it was the obvious choice to base our go to market teams. Brian Lake, a Portland native, is our COO, and was the former CRO at Twistlock, VP Sales at Puppet.
So what motivated the pivot? According to the Portland Business Journal:
However, as is the case in startups, the company saw how customers were using the product and made a pivot. The majority of customers were using StackPulse for security teams. Torq is built off the StackPulse technology and is now a no-code automation platform for security teams. This means that no matter a user’s technical expertise they can build automated workflows across security infrastructure and communication tools.
The product helps security teams speed threat response and remediation, and since the pivot, demand for the product has increased 900%, according to the company. Customers include Fortune 100 companies as well as startups.
Why the significant Series B? According to GeekWire:
Torq is one of many security startups seeing a big boost in business amid various cyberattacks and breaches. Investors are taking note — more than $14 billion has been invested in cybersecurity companies this year, up from a previous record of $7.8 billion last year, Crunchbase reported.
TechCrunch adds:
The promise of Torq is that it can bring together the complex jumble of security tools that modern enterprises now deploy to keep their data safe. The service’s workflows can be triggered at regular intervals or from alerts. These can be simple workflows like reacting to Slack requests from employees for privileged access to a cloud resource, for example, or automating the analysis process of a suspicious file.
Engineers building tools for other engineers has long been a strong suit of the Portland startup community. So it will be interesting to keep on eye on where this goes.
For more information, visit Torq.
