via TechCrunch AI
As AI Agents Become Employees, NewCore Emerges with $66M to Give Them Digital Identities
Cybersecurity startup NewCore emerged from stealth on Monday with $66 million in funding, aiming to solve a challenge it believes many companies will soon face as they deploy AI agents at scale: how to authenticate, govern, and control them effectively.
The seed round was led by cybersecurity-focused venture firm Cyberstarts, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, valuing NewCore at $300 million post-investment.
Companies are increasingly treating AI agents as workplace participants rather than software tools. In 2025, Goldman Sachs tested AI coding agent Devin as a new employee, while McKinsey revealed earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents already work alongside its 60,000 human employees. As we move into 2026, the trend is accelerating—Gartner predicts that by 2027, 40% of large enterprises will have deployed AI agents in production environments, up from less than 10% in 2024. NewCore is betting companies will eventually need to manage these digital workers much like human employees.
For co-founder and CEO Zohar Alon, the opportunity stems from a belief that identity systems have become one of the weakest links in enterprise security. Alon, who previously founded cloud-security startup Dome9 before its acquisition by Check Point, said the rise of AI agents convinced him and his co-founders that existing identity platforms were ill-suited for a future in which software workers operate alongside human employees.
"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.
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, who previously served as CIO of T-Mobile USA and Telstra.
NewCore's platform is designed to manage both human 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. This approach is critical as organizations face new security and compliance challenges: in 2026, regulations like the EU AI Act are beginning to require clear audit trails for autonomous AI actions, and frameworks such as the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications are emphasizing access control and identity management for AI agents.
The idea for NewCore began taking shape in 2023 while Alon was helping review the technology budget of a company that relied on an established identity provider. After seeing the size of the bill, he assumed the customer must be satisfied with the product. "I said, 'You must be extremely happy with them,'" Alon recalled. "He said, 'No, I'm not.'"
The exchange reinforced Alon's belief that identity had become a large but stagnant market dominated by vendors facing limited competitive pressure. With the explosion of AI agents in the enterprise—from coding assistants and customer service bots to automated data analysts and procurement agents—the need for dedicated identity governance for non-human workers has never been more urgent. NewCore's $66 million seed round positions it to challenge incumbents and capture this emerging category before legacy players can adapt.