Overview

Gender

male

Brendan Hannigan joined Polaris Partners in 2016 as a Venture Partner. In this role, he focuses on funding and founding companies in the technology sector with a concentration in cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity. A 25 year technology industry veteran, Brendan was most recently 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.

Previously, Brendan was President and CEO of Q1 Labs, a pioneer and leader in the security intelligence and analytics market. Over eight years from 2003 to 2011 Brendan served in a variety of executive positions, including Executive Vice President of Marketing and Engineering, COO, President and eventually CEO. Before joining Q1 Labs, Brendan was Vice President of Marketing and Technology at Sockeye Networks, a route ­optimization firm that was sold to Internap in 2003. Prior to that, as director of network research at Forrester Research from 1996 to 2000, 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. He currently serves on the board of Bitsight Technologies, a security ratings and third party risk technology company.

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