Hardly a week seems to go by nowadays without some fresh-faced startup introducing a new way of using chatbots in the enterprise. The latest addition to the list is Demisto Inc., which raised $6 million from private equity giant Accel and a number of angel investors this morning to harness the technology for network protection.

Its namesake platform provides a Slack-like messaging environment where an organization’s security staff can communicate and collaborate on their work with help from a resident artificial intelligence intelligence called DBot. It’s described by the startup as nothing short of a force multiplier for network protection and incident response teams. The underlying machine learning algorithms are able to parse a natural-language question about malicious activity in a company’s infrastructure, identify the relevant systems and fetch the information most relevant to the request.

The Demisto Enterprise Security Operations platform thus enables network protection experts to quickly find an old note from a peer concerning a newly-reemerged type of threat, or pull up data on ongoing hacking attempts. DBot is even capable of correlating activity logs from multiple security systems to remove duplicate entries and identify whether there’s a link between attacks against a company’s systems. And if its built-in smarts are not enough, organizations can add their own custom functionality by creating so-called playbooks for certain specialized scenarios.

Demisto sees the extensibility of its software coming especially handy in regulated industries with strict compliance requirements concerning data security. A bank, for instance, might want to have DBot handle personally-identifiable client information more carefully than the traffic logs and other technical data involved in a breach investigation. For added measure, the startup also lets companies record the activity of the internal network protection staff using its software to ensure there are no loose ends that might undermine the inquiry.

Demisto Enterprise Security Operations available immediately on a per-seat basis. The startup also offers a free Slack version that can block malicious attachments and URLs before they have a chance to cause any harm.

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