Cybersecurity startup NewCore has emerged from stealth with $66 million in seed funding, aiming to solve what it sees as a looming crisis for enterprises: how to authenticate, govern and control AI agents at scale. The round was led by Cyberstarts, with participation from Index Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners, valuing the company at $300 million after investment.
Companies are increasingly treating AI agents as workplace participants rather than simple software tools. Goldman Sachs last year tested AI coding agent Devin as a new employee, while McKinsey said earlier this year that 25,000 AI agents already work alongside its 60,000 human staff. NewCore is betting that businesses will eventually need to manage these digital workers much like human employees, with dedicated permissions, lifecycle controls and revocation mechanisms.
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 were designed for a human-only workforce and will buckle under the scale and complexity of AI agents. “We know for sure that 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. NewCore’s platform uses a “split-key” architecture that divides critical identity credentials between the customer and the platform to eliminate a single point of compromise.
For UK businesses, the rise of AI agents presents both opportunity and risk. Firms deploying tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex could benefit from NewCore’s “Agentic Skill” integration, which allows coding assistants to access enterprise systems as managed identities rather than through manually distributed credentials. However, experts warn that without proper governance, AI agents could introduce new security vulnerabilities, particularly as the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) tightens rules on automated decision-making and data access. The European Union’s AI Act also imposes obligations on companies using high-risk AI systems, which could extend to agentic workflows.
NewCore has grown to more than 50 employees across the US and Israel and is currently working with fewer than 10 customers and more than 10 design partners. The startup expects to begin charging customers this summer. Alon predicts AI agents could eventually outnumber human employees in many organisations, making identity management a critical battleground for enterprise security.