source: techcrunch ai: as ai agents become employees, newcore emerges with $66m to give them identities
level: business
cybersecurity startup newcore emerged from stealth with $66 million in seed funding led by cyberstarts, with participation from index ventures and evolution equity partners, valuing the company at $300 million. the funding aims to address a growing challenge as companies deploy ai agents: how to authenticate, govern, and control them at scale. co-founder and ceo zohar alon, who previously founded cloud-security startup dome9, believes existing identity platforms are ill-suited for a future where software workers operate alongside human employees.
newcore's platform manages both human and ai-agent identities in a single system, treating ai agents as first-class identities with their own permissions, lifecycle controls, and revocation mechanisms. the startup uses a split-key architecture that divides critical identity credentials between the customer and the platform to eliminate a single point of compromise. it also offers an agentic skill integration package for coding assistants like anthropic's claude code, openai's codex, and cursor, allowing those ai tools to access enterprise systems as managed identities rather than through manually distributed credentials.
the company has grown to more than 50 employees across the u.s. and israel, with fewer than 10 customers and over 10 design partners currently using the platform. newcore expects to begin charging customers this summer. alon predicts ai agents could outnumber human employees at many technology-focused organizations within a few years, and argues that identity systems will be among the first enterprise systems strained by large-scale ai agent deployment.
why it matters: as ai agents become more common in workplaces, managing their identities securely is critical to prevent unauthorized access and ensure proper governance.
source: techcrunch ai: as ai agents become employees, newcore emerges with $66m to give them identities