Cyber Security Startup NewCore The stealthy exited Monday with $66 million in funding, aiming to solve a problem many companies will soon face when deploying AI agents: authenticating, managing and monitoring them at scale.
The investment was led by cybersecurity-focused venture firm Cyberstarts, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, which valued NewCore at $300 million.
Companies are increasingly treating AI agents as workplace participants rather than software tools. Goldman Sachs last year The AI coding agent tested Dev as a new employeeMcKinsey said earlier this year 25,000 AI agents are already working Along with 60,000 employees. NewCore betting companies will eventually have to manage digital workers like human workers.
For co-founder and CEO Zohar Alon (above, center), the opportunity comes from a belief that identity systems have become one of the weakest links in enterprise security. Alon, who previously founded cloud security startup Dome 9 before that Acquisition by Check PointHe said the rise of AI agents convinced him and his co-founders that existing identity platforms are ill-suited for a future where software workers work alongside human workers.
“We’re confident that the scale and complexity that these things (AI agents) will add to 15- or 20-year-old identity platforms will disrupt them,” he told TechCrunch.
Alon co-founded NewCore with CTO Amihai Neiderman (above, right), former Unit 8200 head of research and founder of AI startup Nym Health, and CRO Erez Yarkoni (above, left), who previously served as CIO at T-Mobile USA and Telstra.
The NewCore platform is designed to manage both human and AI-agent identities 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.
According to Alon, the idea for NewCore began to take shape in 2023, while also helping to review the technology budget of a company that relied on an established identity provider. After seeing the size of the account, he assumed that the customer must be satisfied with the product.
“I said, ‘You’re very happy with them,'” Alon recalled. “He said, ‘No, I’m not.’
The exchange reinforced Alon’s belief that identity has become a large but stagnant market dominated by sellers facing limited competitive pressure.
Established identity providers, including Okta and Microsoft’s Entra, have begun adding capabilities for AI agents. However, Alon claims that these efforts extend platforms originally designed for human workers, while NewCore is built from the ground up for a workforce of humans, machines and AI agents.
“Traditional vendors give you an agent way of dealing with identity, but it’s on the side—it’s not integrated,” Alon said. As an example, NewCore uses a “split-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 “Agent Skill” integration package for coding assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor, which allows those 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 access to, review and override AI agents, providing what Alon describes as a layer of human oversight as companies deploy more autonomous systems.
The startup has grown to over 50 employees in the US and Israel. Alon said the platform is used by fewer than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners. He added that the startup will start charging customers this summer.
Alon predicts that AI agents will be able to outcompete human workers in many tech-oriented organizations within a few years. he said AI agents may eventually compete with India’s IT services company workforce.
Identity is likely to become one of the first enterprise systems strained by the large-scale deployment of AI agents, Alon said, arguing that companies will eventually need new ways to monitor, authorize and terminate software workers operating on their networks.
“It’s inevitable,” Alon said of AI agents becoming a significant part of the workforce. “The point is that we will build the guardrails in time.”
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