NewCore Raises $66 Million to Revolutionize AI Agent Identity

NewCore: A Strategic Fundraising

The cybersecurity startup NewCore has recently raised $66 million to tackle an emerging challenge in the business world: managing the identities of artificial intelligence (AI) agents. This funding round, led by Cyberstarts with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, values the company at $300 million post-investment.

AI Agents: From Simple Tools to True Employees

Companies are beginning to see AI agents not just as simple software tools, but as genuine participants within their teams. For instance, Goldman Sachs tested the AI coding agent Devin as a new employee last year. Meanwhile, McKinsey announced that 25,000 AI agents are already working alongside its 60,000 employees. NewCore bets that companies will need to manage these digital workers in the same way they manage their human employees.

A Vision Driven by Experts

For Zohar Alon, co-founder and CEO of NewCore, the opportunity arises from the belief that current identity systems have become one of the weakest links in corporate security. Alon, who previously founded Dome9, a cloud security startup acquired by Check Point, stated that the rise of AI agents made him realize that existing identity platforms are not suited for a future where software workers operate alongside human employees.

"We know for sure that the scale and complexity that these things [AI agents] are going to add to identity platforms that are 15 or 20 years old are going to break them," he told TechCrunch.

Alon co-founded NewCore with Amihai Neiderman, Chief Technology Officer, a former research leader of Unit 8200 and founder of the AI health startup Nym Health, and Erez Yarkoni, Chief Commercial Officer, who previously served as CIO of T-Mobile USA and Telstra.

A Unique Platform for Multiple Identities

NewCore's platform is designed to manage both human identities and those of AI agents within a single system. The startup claims that AI agents should be treated as first-class identities with their own permissions, lifecycle controls, and revocation mechanisms, rather than as traditional service accounts or machine identifiers.

The idea for NewCore, according to Alon, began to take shape in 2023 while reviewing the tech budget of a company that relied on an established identity provider. After seeing the amount of the bill, he assumed the client must be satisfied with the product. "I said, 'You must be extremely happy with them,'" Alon recalls. "He replied, 'No, I'm not.'" This exchange reinforced Alon's belief that identity had become a vast yet stagnant market dominated by providers facing limited competitive pressure.

Integration and Oversight of AI Agents

Established identity providers, such as Okta and Microsoft's 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 composed of humans, machines, and AI agents.

"Traditional providers give you an agentic way to handle identity, but it's on the margins — it's not integrated," Alon said. For example, NewCore employs what he calls a "split key" architecture that divides critical identity identifiers 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, allowing these AI tools to access enterprise systems as managed identities rather than through manually distributed identifiers. Employees can also use NewCore's mobile app to grant, review, and revoke access for AI agents, providing what Alon describes as a layer of human oversight as companies deploy more autonomous systems.

Rapid Growth and Future Prospects

The startup has grown to over 50 employees in the U.S. and Israel. Alon stated that the platform is currently used by fewer than 10 clients and more than 10 design partners. The startup plans to start charging its clients this summer, he added.

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

Identity, Alon said, is likely to become one of the first enterprise systems subjected to the pressure of large-scale deployment of AI agents, arguing that companies will ultimately need new ways to monitor, authorize, and revoke software workers operating on their networks.

"It's inevitable," Alon said regarding AI agents becoming a significant part of the workforce. "The question is whether we will build the safeguards in time."