As AI agents become employees, NewCore emerges with $66M to give them identities
Cybersecurity startup NewCore emerged from stealth with $66 million in funding on Monday, aiming to solve a challenge it believes many companies will soon face
Cybersecurity startup NewCore emerged from stealth with $66 million in funding on Monday, aiming to solve a challenge it believes many companies will soon face as they deploy AI agents: how to authenticate, govern, and control them at scale. The seed round was led by cybersecurity-focused venture firm Cyberstarts, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, valuing NewCore at $300 million after investment. Companies are increasingly treating AI agents as workplace participants rather than software tools. Goldman Sachs last year tested AI coding agent Devin as a new employee, while McKinsey said earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents already work alongside its 60,000 employees. NewCore is betting companies will eventually need to manage those digital workers much like human employees. For co-founder and chief executive Zohar Alon (pictured above, center), the opportunity stems from a belief that identity systems have become one of the weakest links in enterprise security. Alon, who previously founded cloud-security startup Dome9 before its acquisition by Check Point, said the rise of AI agents convinced him and his co-founders that existing identity platforms were ill-suited for a future in which software workers operate alongside human employees.
“We know for sure that the scale and the 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 chief technology officer Amihai Neiderman (pictured above, right), a former Unit 8200 research leader and founder of healthcare AI startup Nym Health, and chief revenue officer Erez Yarkoni (pictured above, left), who previously served as CIO of T-Mobile USA and Telstra. NewCore’s 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 as traditional service accounts or machine credentials. The idea for NewCore, Alon said, began taking shape in 2023 while helping review the technology budget of a company that relied on an established identity provider. After seeing the size of the bill, he assumed the customer must be satisfied with the product. “I said, ‘You must be extremely 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.
The BriefWire