As AI agents become employees, NewCore is shelling out $66M to power them

Cybersecurity startup NewCore raised $66 million in funding Monday, aiming to solve a challenge it believes many companies will soon face as they deploy AI agents: how to authorize, govern and control them at scale.

The seed round was led by cybersecurity 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 collaborators rather than software tools. Goldman Sachs last year tested AI coding agent Devin as a new employee, and McKinsey said earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents are already working with its 60,000 employees. NewCore bets companies will eventually need to treat those digital workers like human workers.

For founder and CEO Zohar Alon (pictured above, center), this opportunity stems from the belief that identity systems have become one of the weakest links in business security. Alon, who founded cloud security company Dome9 before it was acquired by Check Point, said the rise of AI agents convinced him and his co-founders that existing identity platforms are not fit for a future where software workers work alongside employees.

“We know for sure that the size and complexity of those things [AI agents] they’re going to add 15 or 20-year-old identity platforms and they’re going to break them,” he told TechCrunch.

Alon co-founded NewCore with chief technology officer Amihai Neiderman (pictured above, right), former Unit 8200 research leader and founder of healthcare AI startup Nym Health, and chief commercial officer Erez Yarkoni (pictured above, left), who previously served as CIO of T-Mobile USA and Telstra.

The NewCore platform is designed to handle both human and AI-agent identities in a single system. The startup says AI agents should be treated as first-tier identities with their permissions, lifecycle controls, and revocation mechanisms, rather than being treated like traditional service accounts or machine credentials.

The idea for NewCore, Alon said, began to take shape in 2023 when he helped review the technology budget of a company that relied on an established identity provider. After seeing the size of the bill, you think that the customer must be satisfied with the product.

“I said, ‘You must be very happy with them,'” Alon recalled. “He said, ‘No, I’m not.’ “

The exchange reinforced Alon’s belief that ownership 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 to AI agents. However, Alon says those efforts extend platforms built for human workers, while NewCore is built from the ground up for human workers, machines and AI agents.

“Traditional vendors give you an agent approach to ownership, but it’s on the side — it’s not integrated,” Alon said. As one example, NewCore uses what it calls “split-key” architecture that separates sensitive information between the customer and the platform, an approach designed to eliminate a single point of compromise.

NewCore also provides an “Agentic capability” integration package for coding assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex and Cursor that allow those AI tools to access enterprise systems as managed identities rather than using 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 deploy autonomous systems.

The startup has grown to more than 50 employees across the US and Israel. Alon said the platform is used by less than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners. The startup is expected to start charging customers this summer, he added.

Alon predicts that AI agents could outnumber workers in many technology-focused organizations within a few years, a view recently confirmed by TCS Chairman N. Chandrasekaran, who said AI agents could eventually rival Indian IT services companies in size.

Identity, says Alon, is likely to be one of the first business systems to suffer from the mass deployment of AI agents, saying 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 an integral part of the workforce. “The question is whether we will build the guardrails in time.”