Business Development Representative

Merlin names Torq a key partner for federal AI SOC Modernization. Sep 08, 2026, 08:00 ET Partnership brings agentic AI-powered security operations to federal agencies while accelerating Torq's path to FedRAMP authorization TYSONS CORNER, VA, Sept. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Merlin, a trusted technology partner known for deep government expertise and mission-ready solutions, today announced that Torq, the established agentic security operations leader, will serve as a key technology partner in Merlin's SOC Modernization architecture for federal agencies. The partnership combines Torq's AI SOC Platform capabilities with Merlin's validated architecture, federal market expertise, and compliance infrastructure to help agencies accelerate detection, investigation, and response. Merlin is also supporting Torq's path to FedRAMP authorization through Constellation GovCloud (CGC). Bringing the Agentic SOC to Federal Agencies SOC Modernization is part of Merlin Validated Solutions (MVS), a portfolio of pre-tested, mission-ready architectures. MVS integrates existing independent security technologies into a unified, end-to-end detection-to-response workflow that is automated but governed: actions are validated through a human-in-the-loop authorization model rather than left to run unchecked. Rather than replacing agencies' current investments, MVS unifies disconnected tools into a single coordinated workflow that can identify threats, analyze security data, validate automated actions, and respond at machine speed and scale to give federal agencies and critical infrastructure sectors pre-tested, compliant, mission-ready architectures. The Torq AI SOC Platform will give federal agencies a fundamentally different way to defend mission-critical environments - using agentic AI to continuously ingest and contextualize alerts across the existing security stack, automatically triage threats, investigate the highest-risk incidents, and execute response and remediation within agency-defined guardrails. Rather than adding another point tool, Torq connects the full incident lifecycle so agencies can expand SOC capacity without proportionally expanding headcount, respond at machine speed to increasingly sophisticated threats, and keep human analysts focused on the incidents that require judgment. Every agentic action can remain transparent, governed, and auditable, providing the oversight and accountability federal environments require while each confirmation or correction improves the systems' accuracy over time, enabling agencies to progressively move from human-in-the-loop to human-on-the-loop operations as confidence grows. "Federal agencies don't need another promise of what AI could do for security - they need proven technology that can operate at mission scale, with the governance and controls government demands," said Ofer Smadari, CEO of Torq. "The Torq AI SOC Platform was built for this moment. It brings agentic AI to the full security operations lifecycle, enabling teams to investigate and respond at machine speed while keeping humans in control. With an enterprise-proven platform and a clear path to FedRAMP authorization, Torq is ready to bring the power of the AI SOC to the federal market. Merlin knows how to turn breakthrough technology into mission-ready capability, and we're excited to work together to make agentic security operations a reality across government." The Emerging Government Imperative for the SOC The partnership addresses a growing gap federal agencies are being pushed to close. In March 2026, the White House released President Trump's Cyber Strategy for America, directing federal agencies to adopt AI-powered cybersecurity solutions to defend federal networks and deter intrusions at scale. In June 2026, CISA's Binding Operational Directive 26-04 compressed remediation windows for the highest-risk vulnerabilities to as little as three days, a response to how far AI has narrowed the gap between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation. Legacy SIEM and SOAR tools, and the shrinking pool of analysts who operate them, were not built for that pace. Agentic AI has already moved past pilot stage in the commercial sector; the federal government now needs the same capability delivered through a compliant path. "AI is accelerating vulnerability discovery and rapidly compressing the time from discovery to exploitation. Federal security teams need to operate at the same speed," said Robert Costello, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Merlin. "Torq significantly closes that gap by automating triage, investigation, and response action, helping defenders act faster across increasingly complex environments. Merlin is supporting Torq through its FedRAMP journey, and I'm equally excited to bring the platform into our own SOC and experience it firsthand." The partnership builds on Merlin Ventures' investment in Torq, announced as part of the company's $140 million Series D round earlier this year, and will help Torq rapidly scale the Torq AI SOC Platform to protect the nation's most critical infrastructure. Merlin and Torq will both be exhibiting at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington, D.C., September 8-10, 2026. Visit Merlin at Booth #308 and Torq at Booth #317 to learn more about their partnership and see a demo in-person. Want to see Torq in action? Contact the Merlin Labs team here to learn more: https://www.merlincyber.com/soc-modernization. About Merlin For nearly 30 years, Merlin has accelerated pathways for leading technology providers into mission-critical public sector markets. Combining deep government expertise with technical validation, compliance acceleration, and market access, Merlin transforms promising technologies into mission-ready solutions that help government agencies identify and address their most critical security challenges. Learn more at www.merlincyber.com. 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, Lego, Lowe's, Macy's, Marriott, Procter & Gamble, Prudential, Siemens, Telefónica, Uber, Valvoline, Virgin Atlantic, and Wiz. SOURCE Merlin Group

Torq named a leading innovator in SACR 2026 AI SOC Market Report. By Rick Bosworth, Sr. Director of Product Marketing July 31, 2026 Get a personalized demo. See how Torq harnesses AI in your SOC to investigate, prioritize, and respond to threats faster. Software Analyst Cyber Research (SACR) just published its 2026 AI SOC Market Report, offering an independent assessment of vendors competing in what has rapidly become the most consequential category in enterprise security. Torq features prominently, and the report's framing is worth unpacking because it illuminates what makes the AI SOC category hard to evaluate and why Torq's approach is consequential. Torq's AI SOC: from alert triage through remediation. SACR's most pointed observation about Torq is definitional. The firm writes: "Torq is best understood less as a conventional SOAR vendor with AI features and more as an AI SOC operating layer that can ingest alerts, classify triage outcomes, construct cases, assign work to Socrates, and route remediation through deterministic or agentic workflows depending on the use case." That distinction matters. Much of what gets marketed as AI SOC today amounts to copilot functionality that surfaces recommendations and draft summaries, and stops at basic triage that simply moves the bottleneck down the SOC line by an increment. SACR cuts through that framing: "Torq is trying to own high-volume alert triage and response closure, not simply accelerate analyst review." Owning closure requires a different architecture than assisting analysts. It requires accurate alert classification at scale, a context layer deep enough to support trustworthy, autonomous verdicts, case management that carries investigations forward, and response automation that can act, not just advise. But let's circle back and dwell a bit on the first phase: autonomous alert triage. Auto Triage: context is the differentiator. Torq Auto Triage classifies incoming alerts as false positive, benign, or malicious, enriches them with threat intelligence and business context, and routes them accordingly, all before a human analyst is involved. True positives become cases automatically. False positives are fed back into the per-tenant AI model. SACR called out the quality of Torq's context layer directly: "Torq is not treating alerts as isolated artifacts. It is building a context pipeline around entities, access history, business role, device state, SaaS activity, and related evidence before determining whether an alert should be closed, escalated, or remediated." Three underlying capabilities power that context pipeline. * Torq Reflex is a per-tenant ML model trained continuously on your team's confirmed verdicts. * Torq Recall retrieves the most relevant prior cases from your environment's history and applies an LLM to determine how those precedents apply to the current alert. * Torq Context Graph provides the unified substrate both depend on: a continuously updated map of identities, assets, networks, policies, and analyst decisions, normalized across your entire security stack. The results speak volumes. On average, large enterprises achieve a mean time to triage (MTTT) of 1 minute, a 60x improvement over manual triage. A global biotech titan cites a 97% reduction in noise entering the SOC; imagine how much better their security analysts can focus. A well-known financial services enterprise achieved 99% faster threat triage after deploying Torq. Case Management: the operating unit. When Auto Triage surfaces a true positive, it flows directly into Torq Case Management, where analysts inherit the full verdict, enrichment context, and proposed next steps. They do not reconstruct context from scratch. From within the case interface, analysts collaborate with Torq Socrates(TM), trigger automated response actions, and track investigation continuity across shift handoffs. Each confirmed verdict and analyst correction flows back into Reflex as a training signal, compounding accuracy over time. This is the mechanism behind what SACR identifies as Torq's stronger-than-expected investigation story: the platform captures and encodes analyst judgment, rather than relying on individual expertise to repeat the same reasoning shift after shift. The machine clears the noise. The analysts focus on the highest priority items. Socrates: reasoning and orchestration. Torq Socrates is the agentic reasoning and orchestration layer at the center of the platform. It can be used interactively by analysts, embedded in investigation templates, or assigned cases autonomously. Once on a case, Socrates plans investigations, delegates tasks to specialized Torq HyperAgents(TM), and coordinates response actions across the security stack. SACR characterizes Socrates as "the reasoning and planning layer that decides how much work should be agentic, how much should be deterministic, and where the human should approve or intervene." As SACR notes, "autonomy is a dial, not a binary switch," and Torq's model lets security organizations operationalize that dial gradually: starting with triage and recommendation, moving into human-approved action, and eventually automating higher-confidence alert classes. One Torq customer on PeerSpot describes the cumulative impact: Torq handles a large volume of their alerts autonomously, fundamentally changing the burden placed on their security team. Hyperautomation: execution depth. Torq Hyperautomation is the execution layer that connects AI decisions to real action, supporting both agentic and deterministic workflows across the full security stack. SACR identifies this automation heritage as a structural advantage: "Compared with AI SOC point solutions, Torq's advantage is the ability to connect AI decisioning to actual workflow execution." That advantage compounds. The same platform that classifies an alert, builds the case, and assigns it to Socrates is the platform that executes containment and remediation at machine speed. Customers have measured a 94% reduction in mean time to respond (MTTR), a metric that requires the full chain, not just faster triage at the front end. What SACR's assessment means for buyers. SACR closes its Torq vendor profile with a synthesis that applies beyond Torq specifically: "Autonomous SOC value will be measured by closed-loop operating capability rather than AI summarization." Verdict quality matters. But a verdict quality that does not connect to case construction, investigation, response, and organizational learning is an incomplete story. Torq's architecture is designed around that full loop.

Torq unveils SOC Brain, a self-learning layer for its AI SOC platform. Security hyperautomation platform company Torq Ltd. today introduced Torq SOC Brain, a new layer of its artificial intelligence security operations center platform that trains on a customer's own investigation history and analyst decisions instead of treating every alert as a fresh problem. Torq said most autonomous investigation tools retrieve similar past cases and pass them to a large language model at the point of decision. Its argument is that retrieval is not learning. SOC Brain is built to reason from precedent, absorb the way a given security operations center weighs evidence and revise its judgment after every closed investigation. Three capabilities sit underneath it. Torq Recall pulls up relevant historical cases using deterministic matching on observables such as IP addresses, file hashes, URLs and hostnames, then ranks them by relevance and works out how earlier analyst decisions should bear on the verdict at hand. It reads analyst notes, identifies conflicting precedent and adjusts confidence according to how strong the evidence is. Analysts do not have to tag cases or write rules for any of it to work. Torq Reflex trains dedicated models on a team's confirmed verdicts and its corrections. Reflex matches analyst-corrected verdicts 85% of the time immediately. Alerts it is confident about are automated. The rest are escalated to a human. Torq Retrospect deals with the cold start. It imports resolved incidents from a customer's existing security tools before deployment so Recall and Reflex have organizational history to draw on from the first alert rather than months later. Every customer gets a private SOC Brain. Torq does not pool customer data, share model parameters or train one customer's models on another's incidents, and the company said that isolation is a property of the architecture rather than a setting an administrator switches on. Torq said decisions are explainable and auditable, with automation gated by confidence thresholds and human oversight. Torq positions that as an answer to the governance and transparency demands security leaders are under, including emerging requirements such as the European Union's AI Act. "Every cybersecurity vendor claims their AI is self-learning, but virtually none are," said Ofer Smadari, co-founder and chief executive of Torq. "What the majority do is simply pass cases and hand them to an LLM at the point of decision. That's nothing more than executing based on memory. Self-learning means reaching new conclusions from that history, and that's much harder to build." Smadari added that the payoff for analysts is fewer repetitive reviews and more consistent decisions, with growing confidence that the platform "is making decisions the same way their security team would." The release caps an active year for the company. Torq acquired application security startup Jit.io Ltd. in May to add context graphs to the platform, and in January it raised $140 million at a $1.2 billion valuation in a Series D round led by Merlin Ventures Ltd. that valued it at $1.2 billion. Torq will demo SOC Brain at its booth at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas Aug. 3-6. Image: Torq. A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support its mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE's Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities. * 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more * 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni - Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network. Are you AWS customer? Support SiliconANGLE Financially by buying your AWS services from its Marketplace portal page and links. About SiliconANGLE Media SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios - with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange - SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI. Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Its new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.