NewCore, a cybersecurity startup, has officially launched with a funding announcement of $66 million on Monday. The company aims to tackle a pressing issue as businesses implement AI agents: the need for scalable authentication, governance, and control.
The seed funding round, led by Cyberstarts, a venture capital firm specializing in cybersecurity, also saw contributions from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, bringing NewCore’s valuation to $300 million post-investment.
Organizations are progressively viewing AI agents as integral team members rather than mere software tools. For instance, Goldman Sachs recently evaluated the AI coding agent Devin as a new hire, while McKinsey reported that 25,000 AI agents are already collaborating with their workforce of 60,000 employees. NewCore anticipates that companies will eventually require management systems for these digital workers akin to human staff oversight.
Zohar Alon, co-founder and CEO of NewCore, sees a significant market opportunity driven by the realization that identity systems have become weak links in enterprise security. With a background founding the cloud-security firm Dome9, which was later acquired by Check Point, Alon believes that the emergence of AI agents illustrates the inadequacies of current identity platforms designed for traditional workforces.
“The complexity and scale that these AI agents will introduce to long-established identity platforms will challenge their viability,” he stated.
NewCore was founded alongside chief technology officer Amihai Neiderman, a former leader in Unit 8200 and creator of the healthcare AI startup Nym Health, as well as chief revenue officer Erez Yarkoni, the former CIO of T-Mobile USA and Telstra.
The platform from NewCore aims to oversee identities for both humans and AI agents within a unified system. The company argues that AI agents deserve to be recognized as key identities complete with unique permissions, lifecycle management, and revocation procedures, rather than being treated like conventional service accounts or machine credentials.
The concept for NewCore started to form in 2023 when Alon was reviewing a technology budget for a company dependent on an established identity provider. Despite the hefty bill, the customer expressed dissatisfaction with the service.
“I assumed you must be content with them,” Alon recounted. “His response was a clear no.”
This exchange reinforced Alon’s perception of the identity market as substantial yet stagnant, dominated by vendors with minimal competitive challenges.
Major identity solution providers like Okta and Microsoft’s Entra are starting to incorporate functionalities for AI agents. However, Alon claims these enhancements are merely adaptations of platforms initially meant for human users, while NewCore has been built from the ground up for a workforce blending humans, machines, and AI agents.
“The traditional solutions offer a partial way to manage identity, but they lack full integration,” Alon pointed out. For instance, NewCore employs a “split-key” system to separate critical identity credentials between the client and its platform, minimizing the risk of a central point of failure.
Additionally, NewCore presents an “Agentic Skill” integration suite for coding assistants like Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor, allowing these AI tools to engage with enterprise systems as regulated identities rather than through manually assigned credentials. Employees can also utilize NewCore’s mobile application to manage access for AI agents, creating a human oversight mechanism as businesses increasingly adopt autonomous systems.
Now, NewCore has expanded its workforce to over 50 employees across the U.S. and Israel. While the startup serves fewer than ten clients, it has more than ten collaborators in design partnerships. The company anticipates beginning to charge clients by this summer.
Alon predicts that AI agents may soon surpass human employees in number at many tech-oriented firms, a sentiment echoed by TCS Chairman N. Chandrasekaran, who suggested that AI agents may one day rival the workforce size of his Indian IT services company.
Alon asserts that identity management is poised to be one of the first enterprise systems tested by the large-scale adoption of AI agents. He contends that businesses will eventually seek innovative methods for monitoring, authorizing, and revoking access for software workers navigating their networks.
“AI agents becoming a substantial part of the workforce is inevitable,” Alon remarked. “The concern is whether we will establish the necessary safeguards in time.”
