NewCore emerges from stealth with $66M seed to give AI agents identities
What's the deal? Cybersecurity startup NewCore emerged from stealth on Monday with a $66M seed round to tackle a fast-growing problem: how companies authenticate and control AI agents operating as digital employees. The round was led by Cyberstarts, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity PartnersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, valuing the company at $300M.
NewCore's platform manages both human and AI-agent identities in a single system. Rather than treating AI agents as traditional service accounts, it gives them their own permissions, lifecycle controls, and revocation mechanisms — the same kind of governance applied to human workers.
Why now? AI agents are rapidly entering the workforce. McKinsey said earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents already work alongside its 60,000 employees. Goldman Sachs tested AI coding agent Devin as a new hire last year.
Co-founder and chief executive Zohar Alon — who previously founded cloud-security startup Dome9 before its acquisition by Check Point — argues that existing identity platforms, many 15 to 20 years old, were never designed for this shift. "The scale and the complexity that those things are going to add to 15- or 20-year-old identity platforms are going to break them," he told TechCrunch.
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, a former CIO of T-Mobile USA and Telstra.
What could go wrong? Established players aren't standing still. Okta and Microsoft's Entra have already begun adding AI-agent capabilities. Alon counters that those efforts bolt agent management onto platforms originally built for humans, whereas NewCore was designed from the ground up for a mixed workforce of humans, machines, and AI agents.
The startup is also early-stage by any revenue measure. It has fewer than 10 paying customers and more than 10 design partners, with plans to begin charging this summer. A $300M valuation on a seed round sets high expectations.
The signal: NewCore's oversized seed reflects a broader bet that AI agents will reshape enterprise infrastructure — not just productivity tools, but the security and identity layers underneath. If agents truly become digital employees numbering in the millions, the companies that control their identities will occupy a critical chokepoint.
The startup uses what it calls a "split-key" architecture that divides identity credentials between the customer and the platform, eliminating a single point of compromise. It also offers integrations for coding assistants like Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and Cursor, letting those tools access enterprise systems as managed identities rather than through manually shared credentials.
With more than 50 employees across the US and Israel, NewCore is racing to establish itself before incumbents catch up — or before another startup claims the same ground.
Read more: TechCrunch
