NewCore raises $66M to equip AI agents with identities as they transition into employee roles

Cybersecurity startup NewCore has officially launched from stealth, securing $66 million in funding on Monday. The company aims to address a critical challenge that many organizations will soon encounter as they integrate AI agents: how to authenticate, govern, and control these digital workers at scale.

This seed round was led by Cyberstarts, a venture firm specializing in cybersecurity, with additional investment from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners. Following the investment, NewCore’s valuation stands at $300 million.

Organizations are increasingly viewing AI agents as active workplace participants rather than mere software tools. For instance, Goldman Sachs tested the AI coding agent Devin as a new employee last year, and McKinsey reported earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents are already working alongside its 60,000 human staff. NewCore operates on the premise that companies will eventually need to manage these digital workers with the same rigor applied to human employees.

For co-founder and CEO Zohar Alon (pictured above, center), this opportunity arises from the conviction that identity systems have become one of the most vulnerable points in enterprise security. Alon, who previously founded cloud-security startup Dome9 before its acquisition by Check Point, stated that the emergence of AI agents convinced him and his co-founders that existing identity platforms are ill-equipped for a future where software workers operate alongside human staff.

“We know for sure that the scale and complexity that those things [AI agents] are going to add to 15- or 20-year-old identity platforms are going to break them,” he told TechCrunch.

Alon co-founded NewCore with CTO Amihai Neiderman (pictured above, right), a former Unit 8200 research leader and founder of healthcare AI startup Nym Health, and CRO Erez Yarkoni (pictured above, left), who previously served as CIO of T-Mobile USA and Telstra.

NewCore’s platform is engineered to manage identities for both humans and AI agents within a single system. The startup asserts that AI agents should be treated as first-class identities, possessing their own permissions, lifecycle controls, and revocation mechanisms, rather than being categorized as traditional service accounts or machine credentials.

According to Alon, the concept for NewCore began to take shape in 2023 while he was reviewing the technology budget of a company relying on an established identity provider. Upon seeing the size of the bill, he initially assumed the customer was satisfied with the product.

“I said, ‘You must be extremely happy with them,’” Alon recalled. “He said, ‘No, I’m not.’”

This exchange reinforced Alon’s belief that the identity market has become large yet stagnant, dominated by vendors facing limited competitive pressure.

While established identity providers like Okta and Microsoft’s Entra have started adding capabilities for AI agents, Alon argues that these efforts merely extend platforms originally designed for human employees. In contrast, NewCore was built from the ground up to support a 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 said. As an example, NewCore utilizes what it calls a “split-key” architecture, which divides critical identity credentials between the customer and the platform, an approach designed to eliminate any 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. This allows these AI tools to access enterprise systems as managed identities rather than through manually distributed credentials. Employees can also use NewCore’s mobile app to grant, review, and revoke access for AI agents, providing what Alon described as a crucial human oversight layer as companies deploy more autonomous systems.

The startup has expanded to more than 50 employees across the U.S. and Israel. Alon noted that the platform is currently used by fewer than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners. He added that the startup expects to begin charging customers this summer.

Alon predicts that AI agents could outnumber human employees at many technology-focused organizations within a few years, a view recently echoed by TCS Chairman N. Chandrasekaran, who stated that AI agents could eventually rival the Indian IT services company’s workforce in size.

Alon argues that identity management is likely to become one of the first enterprise systems strained by the large-scale deployment of AI agents. He suggests that companies will eventually need new methods to monitor, authorize, and revoke software workers operating across their networks.

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