As AI agents become employees, NewCore emerges with $66M to give them identities

A New Identity Layer for the AI Workforce

Cybersecurity startup NewCore has emerged from stealth with a $66 million seed round to tackle a growing enterprise challenge: how to authenticate, govern, and control autonomous AI agents at scale. The funding, led by Cyberstarts with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, values the company at $300 million. The move comes as major firms begin treating AI agents as digital employees, with McKinsey already reporting 25,000 agents working alongside its staff, highlighting an urgent need for new identity management infrastructure.

Technical Approach and Core Features

Co-founded by Zohar Alon, who previously sold cloud-security firm Dome9 to Check Point, NewCore argues that legacy identity platforms from vendors like Okta and Microsoft are fundamentally unequipped for a hybrid human-AI workforce. Alon contends these older systems will break under the scale and complexity of managing thousands of non-human identities. NewCore's platform is designed from the ground up to manage both, treating AI agents as first-class citizens rather than simple service accounts.

• Unified Platform: Manages both human and AI agent identities in a single system.
• Split-Key Architecture: Divides critical identity credentials between the customer and the platform to eliminate single points of compromise.
• Agentic Skill Integrations: Provides managed identity access for coding assistants from Anthropic and OpenAI, avoiding manual credential distribution.
• Human-in-the-Loop: A mobile app allows employees to grant, review, and revoke AI agent access in real-time.

NewCore is betting that identity will be the first enterprise system to buckle under the strain of mass AI agent deployment, creating an essential new security category. As organizations like Goldman Sachs experiment with AI agents as coworkers, the attack surface for identity-based threats expands exponentially. While incumbents are adding features for AI, NewCore’s ground-up approach could offer a more robust solution. The company’s early traction with design partners suggests the market is recognizing the need for specialized guardrails before AI agents outnumber human employees, a scenario some industry leaders see as inevitable.

NewCore's $300 million valuation signals a major investor bet that identity and access management (IAM) is not just a feature for AI agents, but a distinct, foundational security category required for enterprise-scale deployment.