When AI agents become employees, NewCore gets $66 million to give them identities

Cybersecurity startup NewCore It emerged from obscurity with $66 million in funding on Monday, aiming to solve a challenge it believes many companies will soon face when deploying AI agents: how to validate, manage and control them at scale.

The seed round was led by cybersecurity-focused firm Cyberstarts, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, and valued NewCore at $300 million after the investment.

Companies are increasingly treating AI agents as participants in the workplace rather than as software tools. Goldman Sachs last year Test AI coding agent Devin as a new employeeWhile McKinsey said earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents are already in operation In addition to its 60,000 employees. NewCore is betting that companies will eventually need to manage these digital workers like human employees.

For co-founder and CEO Zohar Alon (pictured above, center), the opportunity stems from the belief that identity systems have become one of the weakest links in enterprise security. Alon, who previously founded a cloud security startup Dome9 Before that Acquisition via Check PointHe said the rise of AI agents has convinced him and his co-founders that existing identity platforms are unsuitable for a future in which software workers work alongside human employees.

“We know for sure that the scale and complexity that these things (AI agents) will add to identity platforms that are 15 or 20 years old is going to break them,” he told TechCrunch.

Alon co-founded NewCore with CTO Amihai Niederman (pictured above, right), a former research lead at Unit 8200 and founder of healthcare AI startup Nym Health, and Chief Revenue Officer Erez Yarkoni (pictured above, left), who previously served as CTO at T-Mobile USA and Telstra.

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

Alon said the idea for NewCore began taking shape in 2023 while helping review the technology budget for a company that relied on an established identity provider. After seeing the invoice size, assume that the customer must be satisfied with the product.

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

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

Well-known identity providers, including Okta and Microsoft’s Entra, have begun adding capabilities for AI clients. However, Alon sees these efforts as expanding the scope of platforms originally designed for human employees, while NewCore was built from the ground up for a workforce made up of humans, machines, and AI agents.

“Traditional vendors give you an efficient way to handle identity, but it’s sideways — not integrated,” Allon said. For example, NewCore uses what it calls a “split key” architecture that splits critical identity credentials between the client and the platform, an approach designed to eliminate a single point of compromise.

NewCore also offers an “Agentic Skill” integration package for programming assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor that allows these AI tools to access enterprise systems as managed identities rather than with 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 human oversight layer as companies deploy more autonomous systems.

The startup has grown to over 50 employees across the United States and Israel. Alon said the platform is used by fewer than 10 clients and more than 10 design partners. He added that the startup expects to start charging customers this summer.

Alon expects that AI agents will outnumber human employees in many technology-focused organizations within a few years, a view recently echoed by TCS CEO N. Chandrasekaran, who He said AI agents could eventually rival the Indian IT services company’s workforce in size.

Identity will likely become one of the first enterprise systems to suffer from the pressures of large-scale deployment of AI agents, Allon said, arguing that companies will eventually need new ways to monitor, authorize and deactivate software workers working across their networks.

“It’s inevitable,” Allon said of AI agents becoming an important part of the workforce. “The question is whether we will build the guardrails in time.”