NewCore Secures $66 Million to Manage AI Agent Identities Amid Growing Workforce Changes
NewCore, a cybersecurity startup, has emerged with $66 million in funding to address the challenges of managing AI agents in the workplace, as companies increasingly treat them as employees.
NewCore, a cybersecurity startup, has recently come out of stealth mode with $66 million in funding, aiming to tackle a significant challenge that many companies will soon face as they integrate AI agents into their operations: the authentication, governance, and management of these agents at scale.
The seed funding round was led by Cyberstarts, a venture firm focused on cybersecurity, and included contributions from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners. This investment has established NewCore's valuation at $300 million.
As organizations begin to view AI agents as integral members of their workforce rather than mere software tools, the need for effective management solutions has become apparent. For instance, Goldman Sachs experimented with an AI coding agent named Devin as a new employee, while McKinsey reported that 25,000 AI agents are already collaborating with its 60,000 human employees. NewCore's strategy revolves around the premise that managing these digital workers will be akin to managing human employees.
Zohar Alon, the co-founder and CEO of NewCore, believes that existing identity systems represent one of the weakest aspects of enterprise security. Alon, who previously founded the cloud-security company Dome9 before its acquisition by Check Point, has been convinced by the rise of AI agents that traditional identity platforms are inadequate for a future where software workers coexist with human employees. He remarked that the complexity and scale introduced by AI agents will likely overwhelm identity platforms that have been in place for 15 to 20 years.
Alon co-founded NewCore alongside chief technology officer Amihai Neiderman, a former leader in research at Unit 8200 and founder of healthcare AI startup Nym Health, and chief commercial officer Erez Yarkoni, who has held CIO positions at T-Mobile USA and Telstra.
The platform developed by NewCore is designed to manage identities for both human employees and AI agents within a unified system. The startup asserts that AI agents should be recognized as primary identities, complete with their own permissions, lifecycle controls, and revocation mechanisms, rather than being treated as conventional service accounts or machine credentials.
The inspiration for NewCore emerged in 2023 when Alon was reviewing the technology budget of a company that used an established identity provider. After observing the substantial costs, he assumed the company was satisfied with the service, only to be informed otherwise. This conversation solidified Alon's view that the identity market has become large yet stagnant, dominated by vendors with limited competition.
Although established identity providers like Okta and Microsoft’s Entra have started to incorporate features for AI agents, Alon contends that these enhancements are merely extensions of platforms originally designed for human employees. In contrast, NewCore has been specifically developed for a workforce that includes humans, machines, and AI agents.
Alon explained that traditional vendors offer an agentic approach to identity, but these solutions are not fully integrated. For example, NewCore employs a unique 'split-key' architecture that divides critical identity credentials between the customer and the platform, which is intended to eliminate single points of compromise.
Additionally, NewCore provides an 'Agentic Skill' integration package for coding assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor, enabling these AI tools to access enterprise systems as managed identities instead of through manually assigned credentials. Employees can use NewCore’s mobile application to grant, review, and revoke access for AI agents, adding a layer of human oversight as companies increase their reliance on autonomous systems.
Currently, NewCore has expanded to over 50 employees across the United States and Israel. Alon indicated that the platform is being utilized by fewer than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners, with plans to start charging customers by the summer.
Alon anticipates that AI agents could soon outnumber human employees at many technology-focused organizations, a sentiment echoed by TCS chairman N. Chandrasekaran, who has suggested that AI agents might eventually match the size of the workforce at the Indian IT services company.
Alon believes that identity management will be one of the first enterprise systems to feel the strain from the large-scale deployment of AI agents, arguing that businesses will need to develop new methods for monitoring, authorizing, and revoking access for software workers operating within their networks.
He stated, 'It’s inevitable,' regarding the integration of AI agents into the workforce, adding that the key question is whether the necessary guardrails will be established in time.
