Cybersecurity startup NewCore emerged from stealth on Monday with $66 million in funding to solve a looming enterprise crisis: how to authenticate, govern, and control autonomous AI agents as they rapidly join the global workforce.
Securing a $300 Million Valuation
The seed funding round, which values the startup at $300 million post-investment, was led by cybersecurity-focused venture capital firm Cyberstarts. Prominent technology investors Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners also participated in the round.
The Rise of the Digital Co-worker
Enterprises are rapidly transitioning from using AI as basic software utilities to employing them as active workplace contributors. Last year, investment banking giant Goldman Sachs trialled the AI software engineering agent Devin as a virtual employee. Meanwhile, consultancy firm McKinsey revealed earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents already work alongside its 60,000 human staff. NewCore is positioning itself for a future where managing these digital workers is as critical as managing human staff.
Why Legacy Identity Systems Will Break
For co-founder and chief executive Zohar Alon, modern enterprise security is heavily undermined by outdated identity systems. Alon, who previously founded cloud-security firm Dome9 before its acquisition by Check Point, co-founded NewCore because he realised existing identity platforms cannot handle the impending wave of autonomous 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 told TechCrunch.
A Leadership Team of Industry Veterans
Alon established NewCore alongside chief technology officer Amihai Neiderman, a former Unit 8200 research lead and founder of healthcare AI firm Nym Health. Completing the leadership trio is chief commercial officer Erez Yarkoni, who brings deep enterprise experience from his previous roles as Chief Information Officer at T-Mobile USA and Telstra.
Redefining Identity for Humans and Machines
NewCore’s unified platform is engineered to govern both human and AI identities within a single, cohesive system. The startup argues that AI agents must be treated as first-class identities with dedicated permissions, lifecycle management, and instant revocation protocols, rather than being managed through outdated machine credentials or standard service accounts.
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The Genesis of NewCore
The concept for NewCore took shape in 2023, when Alon was auditing the technology budget of an enterprise relying on a major identity provider. Noticing the substantial bill, Alon assumed the client was highly satisfied.
“I said, ‘You must be extremely happy with them,’” Alon recalled. “He said, ‘No, I’m not.’”
This pivotal conversation confirmed Alon’s suspicion that the enterprise identity market, though massive, had become stagnant and lacked genuine innovation due to limited competitive pressure.
Outperforming Legacy Giants
While market leaders like Okta and Microsoft’s Entra have started introducing tools for AI agents, Alon argues these are merely retrofitted add-ons to legacy, human-centric architectures. In contrast, NewCore was built from the ground up to support a hybrid workforce of humans, machines, and autonomous 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 explained. To solve this, NewCore utilises a proprietary “split-key” architecture. This security model divides critical identity credentials between the customer and the platform, effectively eliminating any single point of compromise.
Human-in-the-Loop Control and “Agentic Skills”
To streamline deployment, the company offers an “Agentic Skill” integration package compatible with leading coding assistants, including Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor. This allows AI development tools to securely access enterprise systems as fully managed identities, eliminating the risk of manually distributed credentials. Furthermore, employees can use NewCore’s mobile application to dynamically grant, audit, and revoke permissions for AI agents, establishing a robust human-in-the-loop governance framework.
Market Traction and the Future of AI Workforces
Currently, NewCore employs more than 50 staff across the United States and Israel. The platform is actively utilised by fewer than 10 early customers alongside more than 10 design partners, with commercial monetisation scheduled to begin this summer.
Alon projects that autonomous AI agents will outnumber human employees at many tech-driven firms within the next few years. This sentiment matches predictions by TCS Chairman N. Chandrasekaran, who recently stated that AI agents could eventually match the size of the Indian IT giant’s massive workforce.
Ultimately, identity systems will face the heaviest strain as autonomous agents scale. Companies must act quickly to implement security measures before these digital workers become fully integrated into corporate networks.
“It’s inevitable,” Alon remarked regarding the rise of the digital workforce. “The question is whether we’re going to build the guardrails in time.”