NewCore raises $66M to secure AI agent identities

On Monday, cybersecurity startup NewCore emerged from stealth with $66 million in funding. The seed round was led by Cyberstarts, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, valuing the company at $300 million after investment. The startup aims to solve the challenge of authenticating, governing, and controlling AI agents at scale as they become active workplace participants. For context, McKinsey reported that 25,000 AI agents already work alongside its 60,000 employees, while Goldman Sachs tested the AI coding agent Devin as a new employee last year.

NewCore co-founder and chief executive Zohar Alon argues that identity platforms—enterprise systems used to manage user access—have become one of the weakest links in enterprise security. Alon, who co-founded the company with chief technology officer Amihai Neiderman and chief commercial officer Erez Yarkoni, whose former employers include T-Mobile USA and Telstra, believes existing systems are ill-suited for a workforce that includes software workers. “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,” Alon said. While established identity providers like Okta and Microsoft’s Entra have added capabilities for AI agents, Alon argues these are not fully integrated.

To address this, NewCore treats AI agents as first-class identities with their own permissions and controls, rather than traditional service accounts. The platform uses a split-key architecture, which divides credentials between the customer and the platform. It also offers integration packages for coding assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor, allowing these tools to access enterprise systems as managed identities.

The idea for NewCore began taking shape in 2023. Today, the startup has grown to more than 50 employees across the U.S. and Israel, serving fewer than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners. Alon predicts that AI agents could outnumber human employees at many technology-focused organizations within a few years. This shift highlights the necessity of establishing security guardrails before autonomous systems deploy widely across enterprise networks.

Why it matters

As enterprises deploy autonomous software workers, managing their access and security permissions will become an operational challenge. NewCore is positioning itself to provide the security infrastructure required to govern a workforce of humans and AI agents at scale.