Cyber security startup NewCore emerged from stealth with $66 million in funding on Monday, aiming to solve a challenge it believes many companies will soon face as they deploy artificial intelligence agents: how to authenticate, govern and control them at scale.
The seed round was led by cybersecurity-focused venture firm Cyberstarts, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, valuing NewCore at $300 million post-investment.
Companies are increasingly treating AI agents as workplace participants rather than software tools. Goldman Sachs last year tested AI coding agent Devin as a new employee, while McKinsey said earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents are already working together with its 60,000 employees. NewCore says betting companies will eventually need to manage these digital workers just like human employees.
For co-founder and CEO Zohar Alon (pictured above, center), the opportunity stems from the belief that identity systems have become one of the weakest links in business security. Alon, who previously founded cloud security startup Dome9 before that acquisition from Check Pointhe said the rise of artificial intelligence agents convinced him and his co-founders that existing identity platforms were ill-suited for a future in which software workers work alongside human employees.
“We know for sure that the scale and complexity of these things [AI agents] they’re going to be added to 15- or 20-year-old identity platforms will break them,” he told TechCrunch.
Alon co-founded NewCore with CTO Amihai Neiderman (pictured above, right), former head of Unit 8200 research and founder of AI health startup Nym Health, and chief commercial officer Erez Yarkoni (pictured above, left), who previously served as CIO of T-Mobile. USA and TeMobile.
NewCore’s platform is designed to manage identities of humans and AI agents in a single system. The startup says AI agents should be treated as first-class identities with their own permissions, lifecycle controls and revocation mechanisms, rather than traditional service accounts or machine credentials.
The idea for NewCore, Alon said, began to take shape in 2023 while helping to overhaul the technology budget of a company that relied on an established identity provider. After seeing the size of the bill, he assumed that the customer must be satisfied with the product.
“I said, ‘You must be extremely happy with them,'” Alon recalls. “He said, ‘No, I’m not.’
The exchange reinforced Alon’s belief that identity had become a large but stagnant market dominated by sellers facing limited competitive pressure.
Established identity providers, including Microsoft’s Okta and Entra, have begun adding capabilities for AI agents. However, Alon argues that these efforts extend platforms originally designed for human employees, while NewCore was built from the ground up for a workforce comprised of humans, machines and AI agents.
“Traditional vendors give you an agent-based way of dealing with identity, but it’s on the side — it’s not built in,” Alon said. As one example, NewCore uses what it calls a “dual key” architecture that splits critical identity credentials between the client and the platform, an approach designed to eliminate a single point of compromise.
NewCore also offers an “Agentic Skill” integration package for coding assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor that allows these AI tools to access enterprise systems as managed identities rather than manually distributed credentials. Employees can also use NewCore’s mobile app to grant, control and revoke access to AI agents, providing what Alon described as a level of human oversight as companies deploy more autonomous systems.
The startup has grown to more than 50 employees in the US and Israel. Alon said the platform is used by fewer than 10 clients and more than 10 design partners. The startup expects to start charging customers this summer, he added.
Alon predicts that AI agents could overtake human employees in many technology-focused organizations within a few years, a view recently echoed by TCS chairman N. Chandrasekaran, who has he said AI agents could eventually rival India’s IT services workforce in size.
Identity, Alon said, is likely to become one of the first enterprise systems strained by the large-scale deployment of AI agents, arguing that companies will eventually need new ways to monitor, authorize and revoke the software workers running on their networks.
“It’s inevitable,” Alon said of AI agents making up a significant part of the workforce. “The question is whether we will build the guardrails in time.”
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