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 many companies will soon face when deploying AI agents: how to authenticate, manage, and control them at scale.

The seed round was led by Cyberstarts, a venture firm specializing in cybersecurity, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, and valued NewCore at $300 million.

Companies are increasingly treating AI agents as workplace participants rather than software tools. Goldman Sachs tested AI coding agent Devin as a new hire last year, while McKinsey announced earlier this year that it already has 25,000 AI agents working with 60,000 employees. NewCore believes that companies will eventually need to manage these digital workers just like human employees.

For co-founder and CEO Zohar Alon (pictured above, center), this opportunity stems from the belief that identity systems have become one of the weakest parts of a company’s security. Aron, who 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 work alongside human employees.

“We believe the scale and complexity that these things (AI agents) add to 15- or 20-year-old identity platforms is going to disrupt 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 Commercial Officer Erez Yarkoni (pictured above, left), who previously served as CIO at T-Mobile USA and Telstra.

NewCore’s platform is designed to manage both human and AI agent identities in a single system. The company says AI agents should be treated as first-class identities with their own permissions, lifecycle controls, and revocation mechanisms, rather than traditional service accounts or machine credentials.

Aron said the idea for NewCore began to take shape in 2023 while helping companies rethink their technology budgets that relied on established identity providers. Seeing the size of the bill, he thought the customer must be happy with the product.

“I said, ‘You must be very happy with them,'” Aron recalled. “He said, ‘No, it’s not that.'”

The deal reinforced Aron’s belief that identity has become a large but stagnant market dominated by vendors facing limited competitive pressures.

Established identity providers like Okta and Microsoft’s Entra are starting to add features for AI agents. But Aron argues that while these efforts are extensions of platforms originally designed for human employees, NewCore was built from the ground up for a workforce of humans, machines, and AI agents.

“Traditional vendors provide an agentic way to handle identity, but it’s sideways and not integrated,” Aron says. As an example, NewCore uses a so-called “split key” architecture that splits critical identity credentials between the customer and the platform. This is an approach designed to eliminate a single compromise.

NewCore also offers an “Agentic Skill” integration package for coding assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor. This allows these AI tools to access enterprise systems as managed identities rather than through manually distributed credentials. Employees can also use NewCore’s mobile app to grant, review, and revoke access to AI agents, providing what Aron described as a layer of human oversight as companies deploy more autonomous systems.

The startup has grown to over 50 employees in the United States and Israel. Aron said there are fewer than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners using the platform. He added that the startup plans to start charging customers this summer.

Aron predicts that the number of AI agents could outnumber human employees in many technology-centric organizations within a few years, and TCS Chairman N. Chandrasekaran recently echoed a similar view, saying AI agents could eventually rival the size of the workforce at Indian IT services firms.

Aron said Identity is likely to be one of the first enterprise systems to be taxed by large-scale deployment of AI agents, arguing that enterprises will ultimately need new ways to monitor, approve and revoke software workers running across their networks.

“It’s inevitable,” Aron said of AI agents becoming a significant part of the workforce. “The question is whether the guardrails will be built in time.”