Cybersecurity startup New core emerged quietly with $66 million in funding on Monday, aiming to solve a challenge it believes many companies will soon face when deploying AI agents: how to authenticate, govern and control them at scale.
The initial round was led by cybersecurity-focused venture firm Cyberstarts, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, valuing NewCore at $300 million after the investment.
Companies are increasingly treating AI agents as workplace participants rather than software tools. Goldman Sachs last year Tried AI Coding Agent Devin as a New Hirewhile McKinsey said earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents already working along with its 60,000 employees. NewCore is betting that companies will eventually need to manage those digital workers much like they do human employees.
For co-founder and CEO Zohar Alon (pictured above, center), the opportunity arises from the belief that identity systems have become one of the weakest links in enterprise security. Alon, who previously founded a cloud security startup domo9 before his acquisition by Check PointHe said the rise of AI agents convinced him and his co-founders that existing identity platforms were not suitable for a future in which software workers operate alongside human employees.
“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), former Unit 8200 research leader and founder of healthcare AI startup Nym Health, and Chief Business Officer Erez Yarkoni (pictured above, left), who previously served as CIO of T-Mobile USA and Telstra.
NewCore’s platform is designed to manage 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.
The idea for NewCore, Alon said, began to take shape in 2023 while he was helping review the technology budget of a company that depended on an established identity provider. After seeing the size of the invoice, he assumed the customer must be satisfied with the product.
“I told him, ‘You must be very happy with them,’” Alon recalled. “He said, ‘No, I’m not.’”
The exchange reinforced Alon’s belief that identity had become a large but stagnant market, dominated by vendors facing limited competitive pressure.
Established identity providers, including Microsoft’s Okta and Entra, have begun adding capabilities for AI agents. However, Alon maintains that those efforts expand 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 vendors offer a way to manage identity, but it’s lateral, not integrated,” Alon said. As an example, NewCore uses what it calls 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 “Agentic Skill” integration package for coding assistants like Anthropic’s Claude Code, Codex, and OpenAI’s Cursor that 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, review and revoke access to AI agents, providing what Alon described as a layer of human oversight as companies implement more autonomous systems.
The startup has grown to have more than 50 employees in the United States and Israel. Alon said the platform is being used by fewer than 10 clients and more than 10 design partners. The startup hopes to start charging customers this summer, he added.
Alon predicts that AI agents could outnumber human employees in many technology-focused organizations within a few years, a view recently echoed by TCS president N. Chandrasekaran, who has saying AI agents could rival the size of the Indian IT services company’s workforce.
Alon said identity is likely to become one of the first enterprise systems to come under pressure from the large-scale deployment of AI agents, arguing that companies will eventually need new ways to monitor, authorize and revoke the software workers operating on their networks.
“It’s inevitable,” Alon said of AI agents becoming an important part of the workforce. “The question is whether we are going to build the guardrails in time.”
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