NewCore Secures $66M to Give AI Employees Digital Identities.

NewCore, a cybersecurity startup, has officially launched from stealth with a substantial $66 million in funding. The company aims to address a critical challenge it anticipates many organizations will soon confront: the scalable authentication, governance, and control of AI agents as they become integral to business operations.

The seed funding round was spearheaded by Cyberstarts, a venture firm specializing in cybersecurity investments, with additional contributions from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners. This investment round places NewCore's post-money valuation at an impressive $300 million.

The corporate landscape is increasingly recognizing AI agents not merely as software tools but as active participants within the workforce. Illustrating this trend, Goldman Sachs previously trialed the AI coding agent Devin as a new employee, while McKinsey reported earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents are already working alongside its 60,000 human employees. NewCore's core premise is that companies will ultimately require robust systems to manage these digital workers with the same rigor applied to human staff.

For NewCore's co-founder and chief executive, Zohar Alon, the venture originates from his conviction that enterprise identity systems have become a significant vulnerability in overall security. Alon, who previously founded Dome9, a cloud-security startup acquired by Check Point, explained that the proliferation of AI agents convinced him and his co-founders that existing identity platforms are fundamentally inadequate for a future where software workers coexist with human employees.

“We know for sure that the scale and the complexity that those things [AI agents] are going to add to 15- or 20-year-old identity platforms are going to break them,” Alon shared with TechCrunch, underscoring the impending strain on legacy systems.

Alon established NewCore alongside chief technology officer Amihai Neiderman, a former Unit 8200 research leader and founder of the healthcare AI startup Nym Health, and chief revenue officer Erez Yarkoni, who previously held CIO positions at T-Mobile USA and Telstra, bringing a wealth of experience to the leadership team.

NewCore's platform is specifically engineered to unify the management of both human and AI-agent identities within a single, cohesive system. The startup advocates for treating AI agents as "first-class identities," endowed with their own distinct permissions, lifecycle management, and revocation mechanisms, moving beyond the traditional approach of classifying them as generic service accounts or machine credentials.

The genesis of NewCore's concept, Alon recounted, emerged in 2023 during his review of a technology budget for a company utilizing an established identity provider. Observing the substantial cost, he initially presumed the customer was highly satisfied with the service.

“I said, ‘You must be extremely happy with them,’” Alon recalled. “He said, ‘No, I’m not.’” This revealing exchange highlighted a prevalent dissatisfaction.

This interaction solidified Alon’s belief that the identity market, while large, had become stagnant, dominated by vendors experiencing limited competitive pressure and innovation.

While established identity providers, including Okta and Microsoft’s Entra, have begun integrating capabilities for AI agents, Alon contends that these efforts primarily extend platforms originally conceived for human employees. In contrast, NewCore was purpose-built from the ground up to support a hybrid workforce comprising humans, machines, and AI agents.

“The traditional vendors give you an agentic way to deal with identity, but it’s on the side — it’s not integrated,” Alon stated. As a key differentiator, NewCore employs a "split-key" architecture, which securely divides critical identity credentials between the customer and the platform, a design choice aimed at eliminating any single point of compromise.

NewCore also introduces an “Agentic Skill” integration package, designed for popular coding assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor. This feature enables these AI tools to access enterprise systems as fully managed identities, circumventing the need for cumbersome manual credential distribution. Furthermore, employees can leverage NewCore’s mobile application to grant, review, and revoke access for AI agents, establishing what Alon describes as a crucial human oversight layer as organizations increasingly deploy autonomous systems.

The startup has rapidly expanded to a team of over 50 employees, distributed across the U.S. and Israel. Alon noted that the platform is currently utilized by fewer than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners. NewCore anticipates commencing commercial charges for its services this summer.

Alon forecasts that AI agents could outnumber human employees in many technology-focused organizations within a few years. This perspective aligns with remarks from TCS Chairman N. Chandrasekaran, who has suggested that AI agents could eventually rival the size of the Indian IT services company’s workforce.

Identity systems, Alon asserts, are poised to be among the first enterprise infrastructures to experience significant strain from the widespread deployment of AI agents. He argues that companies will inevitably require novel methods to monitor, authorize, and revoke the access of software workers operating across their networks.

“It’s inevitable,” Alon concluded regarding AI agents becoming a fundamental component of the workforce. “The question is whether we’re going to build the guardrails in time.”