Brendan Hannigan

Entrepreneur Partner

Brendan has been affiliated with Polaris since 2001, working with multiple portfolio companies. After a successful sale and integration of Polaris-backed Q1 Labs to IBM, Brendan joined Polaris Partners in 2016 as entrepreneur partner. Brendan served as Chairman of the Board of Polaris-backed Twistlock until its successful sale and exit to Palo Alto Networks in 2019. He is currently co-founder and CEO of Polaris-backed Sonrai Security and is a board member of Tausight, a Polaris healthcare IT portfolio company.

Brendan was previously the general manager of IBM Security. Under Brendan’s leadership, IBM Security grew significantly faster than the overall security market to become the number one enterprise security provider in the world with almost $2B of annual revenue.

Prior to IBM, Brendan served as president and CEO of Q1 Labs, a pioneer and leader in the security intelligence and analytics market. For over eight years, from 2003 to 2011, Brendan held a variety of executive positions, including executive vice president of marketing and engineering, COO, president, and eventually CEO.

Earlier in his career Brendan was director of network research at Forrester Research where he oversaw the firm’s most successful practices, covering enterprise networks, security technology and public network services. Before Forrester, Brendan served in a variety of senior engineering roles at Digital Equipment Corp., Wellfleet Communications, and Motorola.

Brendan graduated with honors in computer science from University College Dublin in Ireland.