Torq's Series D Announcement
A quick note: Everything I’m sharing here is my subjective take on the campaign built around Torq’s $140M Series D announcement as I’m not privy to the performance or strategy. The recommendations at the end are offered with deep respect for the Torq marketing team and is purely a thought exercise in how I might have approached certain elements differently.
Now, let’s talk about marketing for funding announcements.
The Forgettable Funding Cycle
Here’s a problem that has plagued us marketers for the last decade: A week doesn’t go by without another cybersecurity software vendor raising another round of funding. Each announcement happens, we all nod and cheer (unless it’s your competitor), and then we forget about it the next day. Maybe the next hour, if we’re being honest. Or maybe we don’t even notice it at all…
The “marketing playbook” for these announcements has become depressingly standard. Big announcement from the CEO on LinkedIn. Screen time on the Nasdaq MarketSite. NYSE interview. Earn some media coverage. Check the box. Move on. The announcement gets lost in the noise of every other vendor doing the exact same thing, and by Friday, nobody remembers who raised what or why it matters.
Torq looked at this playbook and decided to do what they do best: tear it up entirely.
Enter Trevor and TorqTV
The Torq marketing team, fronted by Trevor (their comical, self-described 'Junior Media Intern'), added a series of videos to their “TorqTV” programming that documented Trevor’s journey to NYC for the Series D announcement. Each video ran under two minutes, making them easily consumable during a coffee break or between meetings. And here’s what matters: they were genuinely entertaining. Not “vendor trying to be funny” funny. Actually funny.
I found myself eagerly waiting for the next video. That sentence alone should tell you everything about how rare this is.
But here’s where the brilliance really shows through. Throughout every video, Trevor kept referencing “AI SOC.” Over and over. AI SOC this, AI SOC that, the whole journey centered around marrying the words “AI SOC” and “Torq”. This wasn’t accidental. This was strategic repetition at its finest.
One of the hardest challenges in cybersecurity marketing is getting the security community to know who you are and what you actually do. Most vendors struggle with both. Torq solved both problems simultaneously through what psychologists call distributed practice. By spacing out the repetition of “AI SOC” across multiple videos over several days, they embedded that association in viewers’ minds far more effectively than any single announcement could. The continuous repetition drilled into your brain that Torq is an AI SOC vendor, and considering their large Series D raise, they’re likely a category leader.
Torq made their funding announcement unforgettable. More importantly, they made it last longer than a few days. They ensured the market knows exactly what they do. And they did so in a way that left you wanting to come back for more.
The Full Court Press
The TorqTV videos were the headline act, but they didn’t stop there. They understood that a memorable announcement requires presence across multiple channels and formats, all reinforcing the same message.
They purchased vans to drive around Times Square plastered with Torq ads about the Series D and their top customer logos. Look, everyone gets their logo on the Nasdaq MarketSite screen. That's table stakes at this point. But Torq didn't stop there. They put mobile ads on the streets, ensuring the announcement had physical presence throughout one of the world's largest cities beyond the standard playbook moment.
They hosted a Series D party for (likely) investors, customers, and prospects. Then they created a video of that party. This move was quietly brilliant. It plants a subconscious thought in viewers’ minds: Torq creates incredible in-person experiences. That perception will pay dividends when they’re recruiting attendees for future events. People will remember that Torq events look fun, exclusive, and worth attending.
The distribution was above average. Hundreds of earned media placements. Hundreds of engagements across social media channels. And that’s only what’s publicly visible.
All this is to say: This is by far the best fundraising announcement campaign I’ve seen in the cybersecurity software space. Hats off to Torq for innovating on how marketing teams should approach these moments. They showed us what’s possible when you tear up the playbook.
What I Might Have Explored Differently
I'm reaching for straws here. I'm a hard critic by nature, but Torq really knocked this one out of the park. That said, there are three areas where I would have potentially pushed further.
1. Create more noise about what Torq plans to do with this large investment. Beyond the standard “invest in growth” language, I would have surfaced specific investment priorities. For example, they have plans to expand into the federal market. There’s real value in pulling these plans out of the generic announcement and bringing visibility to them. Specific plans signal strategic thinking. They give different audience segments different reasons to care.
To be completely fair, the marketing was so exceptional that it drove me to actually read the funding announcement blog, which is where those details lived. So the strategy may have very well been “do exceptional marketing to get people to want to consume the funding blog,” and if that was the plan, it worked. But I still think there’s an opportunity to surface specific investment priorities more prominently in the external messaging.
2. Capitalize on the awareness with immediate next-step content. Their announcement proved two things simultaneously: they’re growing exceptionally well (you don’t raise a Series D without serious traction), and they’re an AI SOC vendor. The next logical step for a buyer is to educate themselves on what AI in the SOC actually looks like and how it works.
Torq has this fantastic asset called the “AI or Die Manifesto” that explains exactly that: how to strategically approach AI in the SOC. My recommendation would be to promote this asset very, very heavily immediately after the announcement to capitalize on the awareness and interest the announcement created in both Torq as a vendor and AI SOC as a category. The announcement opens the door. The manifesto walks people through it. That’s a one-two punch that turns awareness into education into consideration.
3. Push for broader reach beyond LinkedIn for TorqTV. And this is where I get really curious about untapped potential: the distribution for the TorqTV videos seemed heavily weighted toward LinkedIn with room for broader reach. Trevor’s personal profile (954 followers) generated 942 engagements and 34 comments across 10 posts. The Torq company page generated 1,147 engagements and 29 comments across 6 posts, meaning the company page averaged 2.5X more engagement per post. Meanwhile, on YouTube, the videos collectively generated 398 views.
Now, I know engagements aren’t apples-to-apples with video views, and LinkedIn was clearly the right primary channel. But these numbers suggest there’s still room to expand reach. The content was genuinely entertaining, the kind of thing that could travel well if pushed into broader channels or promoted more aggressively. I’d be curious what the numbers would look like with paid amplification behind the best-performing episodes, if they partnered with a security influencer, or if they’d seeded the content in relevant Reddit communities, Slack groups, or other places where security practitioners hang out.
The Bottom Line
What Torq did here matters beyond their own announcement. They showed the rest of us in cybersecurity marketing that funding announcements don’t have to be forgettable. They don’t have to follow the same tired playbook. They can be creative, memorable, strategically sound, and actually effective at driving market perception.
That is where I stand. Torq raised the bar. Now the rest of us need to figure out how to meet it.
Every week, I write about marketing campaigns in the cybersecurity software space that stand out strategically and/or have creative execution worth studying. And every quarter, I select three “Campaigns of the Quarter” where the marketers who led the campaigns receive a free, personalized Funko Pop. Yes, I’m serious. Here’s mine as proof:
If you’ve led a campaign you’re proud of or know someone who has, message me on Substack or LinkedIn to submit it. I want to see what you’re building.
Originally published on Campaign Telemetry.
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