Why would anyone want to start an AI security company? It’s a fair question, and one we asked ourselves many times. Security is a notoriously hard market: crowded, cynical, and full of products that overpromise and underdeliver. But we also knew, from our years embedded in the trenches with the world’s best security teams, that the real work of security was still painfully manual, fragmented, and exhausting. We believed there had to be a better way, and we wanted to build it.

The cybersecurity industry has no shortage of bold claims. Every year, the RSA Conference floor fills with vendors promising “next-generation solutions” and “AI-powered detection.” But most of these products are little more than last decade’s SIEM tools dressed up with superficial LLM features.

The truth is: security teams don’t need more dashboards or "insights." They need time.

The State of Security Today

Security organizations remain bogged down by:

  • Alert fatigue: Hours lost investigating false positives while genuine threats risk slipping through.

  • Context switching: Investigations that require jumping between 5 to 10 disconnected tools just to gather the basics.

  • Documentation overhead: Endless manual reporting that turns skilled threat hunters into technical scribes.

AI gives us a chance to reimagine the solutions to these challenges. Not by replacing humans, but by building tools that work with them, seamlessly integrated into their workflows.

Why Cotool

Cotool is built for practitioners: we're not just another dashboard.

We’ve been inspired by the success of AI coding tools like Cursor and Windsurf, which don’t aim to replace engineers but instead help them become 10x more productive. Cotool applies the same product philosophy to security teams: augmenting practitioners with powerful tools that eliminate repetitive work and free them to focus on what truly matters.

Who We Are

We started Cotool in 2025 after years of building security tools for some of the world’s most demanding organizations.

Max Pollard, CEO: Formerly led the forward deployed engineering team at Material Security, scaling it from 1 to 8 engineers. Previously Solutions Engineering at Okta.

Eddie Conk, CPO & Head of AI: Led ML engineering at Material Security, training large-scale phishing detection models. Previously ML Engineering at Apple.

Logan Carmody, CTO: Technical lead for phishing protection at Material Security, architecting much of the core Phishing Detection infrastructure of the product. Previously Staff SWE at LinkedIn focused on infrastructure.

We believe security should be empowering, not exhausting. Our mission is simple: help security teams reclaim their time and focus on what truly matters.

Best job in the world. Back to work.

Cotool Team

Founding Team

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