When it comes to the closet competitors of the security hyperautomation startup, ‘we are years ahead of them,’ Torq CEO Ofer Smadari tells CRN.

Torq is planning to deploy its new $70 million funding round — which is the second major fundraise of the year for the security “hyperautomation” startup — to advance its AI-powered capabilities while boosting investments into the channel, Co-founder and CEO Ofer Smadari told CRN.

On Tuesday, Torq announced raising the Series C funding round led by Evolution Equity Partners, which comes just eight months after the company added $42 million in new funding in January.

[Related: ‘Hyperautomation’ Startup Torq To Power MDR Provider Deepwatch In SecOps Shakeup]

The startup also disclosed Tuesday that it’s on track to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) by the end of 2026. Torq did not disclose its current ARR.

Founded in 2020, Torq offers a no-code method for automating security operations activities, which boosts security analyst productivity by completing numerous SecOps tasks faster and more easily, according to the company.

A major emphasis for Torq has been around displacing “legacy” providers of SOAR (security orchestration, automation and response) technology, Smadari said.

When it comes to “legacy” rivals in the SecOps tools space, “we are years ahead of them” in terms of capabilities, he said.

Notably, a number of its customers are other security vendors, including SentinelOne, Wiz and Deepwatch, the company said. In the case of Deepwatch, Torq has provided the backbone infrastructure for the vendor’s managed detection and response (MDR) platform since late 2023, Torq executives told CRN previously.

As for the new fundraise, Smadari said a major focus for the new capital will be on expanding the startup’s push with solution and service provider partners. Many of the largest security-focused solution providers have already become Torq partners, he said.

“We are heavily investing in the big ones,” Smadari said — though he noted that the aim over time will be to expand more broadly within the channel to include regional solution providers.

Other investors in Torq’s Series C funding round included Bessemer Venture Partners, Notable Capital, Greenfield Partners and Strait Capital. The startup has now raised a total of $192 million in funding to date.

What follows is an edited and condensed portion of CRN’s interview with Smadari.

What are the major goals for the new funding?

We haven’t spent the first dollar from the last round. But things are working really well. We are getting Fortune 50, Fortune 100 customers out of the legacy [vendors]. They are moving to our platform. And we feel we need to double down, because the market is happening. We are being approached by so many [solution providers] — like Optiv and GuidePoint Security and Trace3 and SHI and WWT. And we feel like we need to push a lot harder to take the market. We are feeling this is just the time.

What are some of the channel investments you’ll be focusing on with the new round?

We are working with channels a lot. We are getting every deal through the channel. Even if it’s inbound, we are being very explicit with our sales reps to move everything to the channel. We are working heavily with sponsoring channel events. We are investing almost half of our marketing budget just in events with channel.

What do you point to as the biggest differentiators for Torq at this stage?

The differences between the legacy [vendors] and what we do is very different. We’ve built this platform from the bottom up in the past three and a half years. The main difference between us and the legacy, and why enterprises are moving to Torq, is that we are highly flexible — meaning that you can build whatever process that you want to build. You’re not limited to anything. We can connect to anything, and we can run any process — even if it’s hard-coded or no code or low code. So you have full flexibility. And we a lot of AI functionality to help you to achieve a lot more.

Part of the big difference is, we are serving not just the SOC [security operations center]. SOC is a huge consumer of automation. But for most of our clients, we are working with at least five teams. We are working with cloud security teams to remediate and automate and orchestrate Wiz alerts. And we are serving other teams — GRC [governance, risk and compliance] teams and threat hunting teams and IAM [identity and access management] teams. So we are focusing on the broader automation landscape, and not just in the SOC. And you don’t need developers to build those [functionalities]. With the legacy, you need developers.

So from the legacy competitors, we are years ahead of them — years. It’s not parallel to anything that they have today.

Where are you looking to take your product next?

We’re working on huge things going forward. We are focusing on helping the SOC to be a lot more efficient, a lot better. Today with AI, it takes just minutes to create a new attack. Organizations are being attacked a lot more often. So you’re getting a lot more alerts. So we are improving our infrastructure to run at scale. We are running today more than 60 million automations a day for our customers. So we are going to invest a lot in improving the scalability for our customers and also to add lots of product functionality.

We’re working on some capabilities that will have GenAI to help you with threat hunting, without even building automation. Eventually we want AI to take all of your data, and understand what needs to be done, and then just spin up cases when it’s needed — until we get eventually to the autonomous SOC platform.

So you don’t feel a truly autonomous SOC is too far off?

It’s not. I think it’s coming. AI is evolving every day. It’s getting a lot cheaper. It’s getting commoditized really fast. Today, 60 percent of our innovation is just on building AI tools, just to help deal with threats.

Given how fast the attacks are coming, do you see that using AI and autonomous responses will be essential in the future?

I believe so. I was chatting at Black Hat with the CISO of one of the four biggest banks in the U.S. He said that, three years ago, they had 1 billion security events a day. And he said that today, it’s 4 billion, and growing each quarter by 25 percent. So you can imagine how it will look in 10 years. So we need something that can run on hyperscale. And the monolithic platforms that [exist] today, cannot do that.