Cotool: The AI Platform Giving Time Back to Security Teams
Cotool is a San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup founded in 2025 by Max Pollard, Eddie Conk, and Logan Carmody. The company emerged from a shared frustration among seasoned security professionals: despite advances in cybersecurity tooling, security teams continue to drown in repetitive work, fragmented systems, and mountains of documentation.
The Cotool founders have deep roots in cybersecurity, with prior experience at companies like LinkedIn, Apple, and Material Security. Their time spent working closely with high-performing security teams at organizations like OpenAI, Coinbase, Figma, and DoorDash made one thing crystal clear — security professionals don’t need more dashboards or vague "AI-powered insights." What they need is their time back.
With Cotool, the founding team set out to create a platform that not only simplifies workflows but puts AI directly into the hands of practitioners, helping them eliminate tedious tasks and stay focused on threat hunting and strategic defense.
What Problem Does Cotool Solve?
The cybersecurity landscape is notoriously complex, but many of the pain points security teams face are surprisingly universal. Cotool was born to solve three of the most pressing challenges plaguing security teams today:
- Alert Fatigue: Security teams spend hours chasing false positives while real threats sometimes go unnoticed. The sheer volume of alerts can quickly become overwhelming.
- Context Switching: A single investigation might require hopping between 5 to 10 tools just to gather basic information. This constant switching disrupts flow, delays investigations, and burns out engineers.
- Documentation Overhead: After triaging alerts, security professionals are often forced into the role of technical writers. Writing thorough reports is time-consuming but critical, and the manual nature of this work slows down the entire process.
In short, security teams are spending less time protecting their organizations and more time navigating the mechanics of their own tools. Cotool is here to change that.
How Does Cotool Work?
Cotool delivers a platform of AI-powered tools designed to slot seamlessly into existing security workflows. Unlike legacy solutions that require teams to bend their process to match a tool’s rigid logic, Cotool is flexible, composable, and designed for real-world use. Its core offering is composed of three primary components:
AI Co-Pilot for Investigations
Cotool’s AI co-pilot acts as a real-time partner during alert triage and threat investigations. It automatically pulls together relevant context from disparate systems — ticketing tools, SIEMs, logs, endpoint data, threat feeds — so analysts can make decisions quickly without wasting time digging for information.
Instead of juggling tabs and tools, engineers get a unified, AI-assembled picture of what’s happening, empowering faster, more confident responses.
No-Code Agent Builder
Cotool also includes a no-code agent builder that lets security teams turn successful investigations into reusable workflows. With just a few clicks and some natural language input, engineers can create agents that replicate their logic and decision-making process — and then reuse or adapt them for similar cases in the future.
This transforms individual analyst intuition into institutional knowledge — automating tasks while retaining human intelligence.
Instant Automated Documentation
One of Cotool’s most celebrated features is its ability to generate rich, accurate reports in seconds. Whether for compliance, audits, or internal briefings, Cotool handles the heavy lifting of documentation so engineers can move on to the next challenge.
Reports include timestamps, evidence, reasoning, outcomes, and contextual explanations — all generated instantly by the system after a workflow is completed.
Who Is Behind Cotool?
Cotool’s three co-founders bring a rare combination of hands-on engineering experience, AI expertise, and deep cybersecurity domain knowledge. Here's a closer look at the team:
- Max Pollard (CEO): Formerly led forward-deployed engineering at Material Security, building and scaling a team that worked directly with some of the most sophisticated security teams in the world. Prior to that, he was a Software Engineer at Okta. He holds a BA in Business and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
- Eddie Conk (CPO & Head of AI): Led ML Engineering at Material Security, where he built models to detect phishing attacks at enterprise scale. Before that, he was an ML Engineer at Apple. He earned a BA in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
- Logan Carmody (CTO): Technical lead for Phishing Protection at Material Security and an early developer of the company’s proprietary threat detection language. Prior to Cotool, he was a Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn. He holds a BS in Computer Science and Philosophy from Duke University.
Together, they bring years of experience working shoulder-to-shoulder with elite security teams, giving them a practical, grounded understanding of what real-world cybersecurity operations require.
How Is Cotool Different from Other Cybersecurity Platforms?
Many cybersecurity products claim to use AI, but often fall short by requiring users to adapt their workflows to fit the product. Cotool reverses this paradigm by giving practitioners control and flexibility.
Key differentiators include:
- Composable and Modular: Teams can create and customize their own agents, workflows, and reports — no need to rely on vendor-set logic or templates.
- Truly Agentic: Instead of passive AI that makes suggestions, Cotool agents can take actions, automate flows, and support decision-making with real autonomy.
- No-Code Interface: The platform is accessible to technical and non-technical users alike. Engineers can fine-tune agents using natural language and configure permissions with ease.
- Human-Centric: Rather than trying to replace security professionals, Cotool augments them, turning expertise into scalable automation.
Early users have seen a 70–90% reduction in investigation time and significant improvements in detection quality and coverage.
Who Is Cotool For?
Cotool is built for modern security teams who are tired of drowning in alerts, juggling a dozen tools, and writing endless reports. Whether a startup with a small security team or a large enterprise with a robust SOC, Cotool scales to fit the size, complexity, and maturity of the organization.
The platform is especially valuable for teams focused on:
- Threat detection and response
- Phishing investigation
- Alert triage
- Compliance and audit reporting
- Detection engineering
What Does the Future Hold for Cotool?
Cotool is still in its early stages, but the momentum is strong. With backing from Y Combinator (Spring 2025), a deeply experienced founding team, and validation from early adopters, Cotool is well-positioned to redefine how cybersecurity teams operate in an AI-first world.
The company’s roadmap includes:
- Expanded integrations with third-party security tools
- Advanced reasoning capabilities for AI agents
- More intuitive agent management dashboards
- Support for real-time incident response collaboration
Ultimately, Cotool’s goal is simple but ambitious: give security teams their time back by eliminating the busywork and letting them focus on what really matters — staying ahead of threats.
Why Does Cotool Matter?
As cyber threats grow more sophisticated and organizations handle more sensitive data than ever, the pressure on security teams is only increasing. Yet the tools they rely on often feel stuck in the past — fragmented, slow, and disconnected from how people actually work.
Cotool stands out not just because it’s powered by AI, but because it’s built with empathy for the user. By embedding itself into real workflows, simplifying the creation of automation, and removing friction, Cotool is doing more than streamlining operations — it’s redefining what it means to be a security professional in the AI era.
For security teams who are ready to stop firefighting and start leading, Cotool is the co-pilot they’ve been waiting for.