Cybersecurity startup NewCore has officially launched from stealth mode, announcing $66 million in funding on Monday. The company aims to address a challenge it believes will soon become widespread as organizations deploy AI agents: how to authenticate, govern, and control these digital entities at scale. The seed round was led by Cyberstarts, a venture firm specializing in cybersecurity, with additional backing from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners. This investment values NewCore at $300 million post-funding.

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Businesses are increasingly treating AI agents as active participants in the workplace rather than mere software tools. For instance, Goldman Sachs tested AI coding agent Devin as a new employee last year, while McKinsey reported earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents already work alongside its 60,000 human staff. NewCore is betting that companies will eventually need to manage these digital workers in much the same way they manage human employees.

For co-founder and CEO Zohar Alon, the opportunity stems from his 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 where software workers operate alongside human employees. Alon co-founded NewCore with chief technology officer Amihai Neiderman, a former Unit 8200 research leader and founder of healthcare AI startup Nym Health, and chief revenue officer Erez Yarkoni, who previously served as CIO of T-Mobile USA and Telstra.

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NewCore’s platform is designed to manage both human and AI-agent identities within a single system. The startup argues that AI agents should be treated as first-class identities, complete with their own permissions, lifecycle controls, and revocation mechanisms, rather than as traditional service accounts or machine credentials. Alon said the idea for NewCore began taking shape in 2023 while he was 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.'"

This exchange reinforced Alon’s view that identity had become a large but stagnant market, dominated by vendors facing limited competitive pressure. Established identity providers like Okta and Microsoft’s Entra have started adding capabilities for AI agents. However, Alon argues that these efforts extend platforms originally designed for human employees, whereas NewCore was built from the ground up for a workforce comprising humans, machines, and AI agents. "The traditional vendors give you an agentic way to deal with identity, but it’s on the side—it’s not integrated," Alon said.

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As one example, NewCore employs a "split-key" architecture that divides critical identity credentials between the customer and the platform, an approach designed to eliminate a single point of compromise. The startup also offers an "Agentic Skill" integration package for coding assistants like Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor. This allows those AI tools to access enterprise systems as managed identities rather than through manually distributed credentials. Employees can use NewCore’s mobile app to grant, review, and revoke access for AI agents, providing what Alon described as a human oversight layer as companies deploy more autonomous systems.

The startup has grown to over 50 employees across the U.S. and Israel. Alon said the platform is currently being used by fewer than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners. The company expects to begin charging customers this summer, he added. Alon predicts that AI agents could outnumber human employees at many technology-focused organizations within a few years—a view recently echoed by TCS Chairman N. Chandrasekaran, who has said AI agents could eventually rival the Indian IT services company’s workforce in size.

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Identity, Alon said, is likely to become one of the first enterprise systems strained by large-scale deployment of AI agents. He argues that companies will eventually need new ways to monitor, authorize, and revoke software workers operating across their networks. "It’s inevitable," Alon said of AI agents becoming a significant part of the workforce. "The question is whether we’re going to build the guardrails in time."