Tech news in 3 minutes
As AI agents become employees, NewCore emerges with $66M to give them identities
Cybersecurity startup NewCore exited stealth on Monday with $66 million in seed funding, aiming to solve the challenge of authenticating, governing, and controlling AI agents at scale. The round was led by Cyberstarts, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, valuing NewCore at $300 million post-investment. NewCore co-founder and CEO Zohar Alon (formerly of Dome9) believes companies will soon need to manage AI agents as workplace participants, not just software tools. He argues that existing identity platforms, designed 15-20 years ago, are ill-suited for a future where software workers operate alongside humans. The platform manages both human and AI-agent identities in a single system, treating agents as first-class identities with their own permissions, life cycles, and revocation mechanisms. The startup uses a “split-key” architecture that divides critical credentials between the customer and platform to eliminate a single point of compromise. It also offers an “Agentic Skill” package for coding assistants like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, allowing them to access enterprise systems as managed identities. Employees can use NewCore’s mobile app to grant, review, and revoke agent access. Founded by Alon, CTO Amihai Neiderman (former Unit 8200 leader and Nym Health founder), and CCO Erez Yarkoni (former CIO of T-Mobile USA and Telstra), NewCore has grown to over 50 employees across the U.S. and Israel. It currently serves fewer than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners, with plans to start charging customers this summer. Alon predicts AI agents could outnumber human employees at many tech organizations within a few years, making identity one of the first enterprise systems strained by large-scale agent deployment. He stresses the need to build guardrails in time.